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ROBERT BROWNING. 



SELECT POEMS 



OF 



ROBERT BROWNING. 



Edited, with Notes, 

BY 

WILLIAM J. ROLFE, A.M. 

AND 

HELOISE E. HERSEY 




NEW YORK^ 

HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, 

F K A N K I. I N SQUARE. 
1887. 



I \ J 1^*-* K. 



I\n3 



ENGLISH 


CLASSICS. 


Edited i!y WM. 


T. ROLFE, A.M. 


Illustrated. i6mo, Cloili, 56 cents per 


volume ; Paper, 40 cents per voliime. 


1 1 
Shakespeare's Wokks. 1 


The Merchant of Venice. 


The Taming of the Shrew. 


Olht-llo. 


All ;s Well that Endb Well. 


Jnlius Cxsar. 


Coriolanus. 


A Midsummer-Night's Dream. 


I'he Comedy of Errors. 


Macbeth. 


Cynibeline. 


Hamlet. 


Antony and Cleopatra. 


Much Ado about Nothing. 


Measure for Measure. 


Komeo and Juliet. 


Merry Wives of Windsor. 
Love's Labour 's Lost. 


As You Like It. 


The Tempest. 


Two Gentlemen of Verona. 


Twelfth Night. 


Timon of Athens. 


The Winter's Tale. 


Troilus and Cressida. 


King John. 


Henry VI. Part I. 


Kichard II. 


Henry VI. Part II. 


Henrv IV. Part I. 


Heniy VI. Part III. 
Pericles, Prince of lyre. 


Henr'v IV. Part II. 


Henrv V. 


The Two Noble Kinsmen. 


Kichard III. 


Venus and Adonis, Lucrece, etc. 


Henry VIII. 


Sonnets. 


King Lear. 


Titus Andronicus. 


Goldsmiths Select Poem 


s. Gray's Select Poems. 


Bkowning's 


Select Poems. 


Puumshed bv harper & 


BROTHERS, New York. 


1^^ Atijy of the above works will be se 


it by mail, postage frepaid, to any part 


of the United States, 


oil receipt of the price. 



•yib^ib 



- rl 



'\\ 



Copyright, 1886, by Harper & Brothers. 



PREFACE. 



The publishers liave desired that this book should be included in the 
series of "English Classics" edited by me, and that my name should be 
put first on the title-page ; but I may say here in the preface that the 
better part — in every sense — of the work has been done by Miss Hersey, 
who knows tenfold more about Browning than I do. She originated the 
plan, selected the poems, prepared the Introduction, and wrote more 
than half of the notes. I have carefully collated the earlier and later 
texts of the poems (see especially the various readings of The Lost Lead- 
er, Childe Roland, and Pippa Passes, none of which appear in their later 
form in the American editions), and have revised and filled out the Notes. 

We have worked together in putting the results of our individual la- 
bors in shape for the press ; and we venture to hope that the book is the 
better for having two editors instead of one. We are more confident of 
the excellence of choice and arrangement in the text than of the wisdom 
and completeness of the\annotations. In the latter, however, we trust 
that at least we have not merited the scathing reminder of Browning's 
own lines in M<ister Hiigiies of Saxe-Gotha : 

" So we o'ershroud stars and roses, 
Cherub and trophy and garland; 
Nothings grow something which quietly closes 
Heaven's earnest eye: not a glimpse of the far land 
Gets through our comments and glozes." 

W. J. R. 

Cambridge, July 28, 1886. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

Introduction to Select Poems of Browning 9 

I. The Life and Works of Browning 10 

II. Chronological Table of Browning's Chief Works. . 12 

III. Helps to the Study of Browning 13 

IV. Critical Comments on Browning , 14 

Herve Riel 33 

Clive 39 

•' How they Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix " 52 

The Lost Leader 55 

The Bishop Orders his Tomb at St. Praxed's Church 57 

Rabbi Ben Ezra 61 

Ben Karshook's Wisdom 69 

" Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came " 70 

The Boy and the Angel 78 

Two Camels 81 

Youth and Art 85 

Song 88 

May and Death 89 

My Star 90 

One Word More 91 

PrOSPICE 99 

Invocation • , 100 

A Wall joi 

Prelude to " Dramatic Idylls " 103 

PippA Passes 104 

Notes jry 



INTRODUCTION 

TO 

SELECT POEMS OF ROBERT BROWNING. 



Generalizations about so varied a poet as Robert Brown- 
ing are as misleading as they are easy. It has become the 
fashion for each critic to speak of him with a series of more 
or less suitable epithets. He is obscure, dramatic, Christian, 
modern, introspective, and so forth. But, in truth, neither 
his friends nor his enemies are in position to know altogether 
or even almost what he is. A few years of honest study and 
honest reflection will not be too much to give to a poet who 
makes, tacitly at least, such claims as Robert Browning. 

The present volume aims at being the first step in such 
quiet, unassuming work. We need little general analysis ot 
Browning. The real aim of this little book is simply to 
put students into the way of pursuing successfully a study 
of his poetry. Never was author for whom it is more 
disastrous that his readers should begin at the wrong end. 
This volume hopes to present an untangled skein to its 
student. 

For this purpose are needed : (a) the chief facts of the 
poet's life ; (d) a chronological table of his longer works ; 
(c) a few citations from the best criticisms of him ; (//) a brief 
list of the reviews or other articles worth consulting; (e) 
careful notes, explanatory of historical, local, or otherwise 
obscure allusions in the selections. 



I o INTRO D UC T/OiV. 



I. THE LIFE AND WORKS OF BROWNING. 

Robert Browning was born at Camberwell, London, in 
1812. His father was a clerk in the Bank of England. 
When Robert was eight years old he made a metrical trans- 
lation from Horace. He studied at London University. At 
twenty he published his first poem, Pauline; and at twenty- 
three, Paracelsus. From that time his production has been 
steady and large. In 1846 he married Elizabeth Barrett. 
In 1849 ^ son was born to him. In 1861 Mrs. Browning 
died. The years from 1851 to 1861 were a time of less pro- 
ductive activity than any others of his life, but were perhaps 
the most important in his intellectual and emotional devel- 
opment. 

His first poem, Pauline^ scarcely commanded the atten- 
tion of the professional critics — usually alert to find even a 
novel failure \ but the value oi Paracelsus was recognized by 
many critics. The drama of Strafford^ which followed, must 
be confessed a failure upon the stage, though Macready did 
his best for its success. After Sordello — a hopeless poem 
for a public unaccustomed to Browning's manner, — came a 
most extraordinary series known as Bells and Pomegranates. 
The very name seems to have been inexplicable to most 
readers. It was simply a conceit borrowed from the decora- 
tion upon the robe of the Jewish high-priest.* Mr. Brown- 
ing explained it at the end of the series t in this fashion : " I 
meant by the title to indicate an endeavour towards some- 
thing like an alternation, or mixture, of music with discours- 
ing, sound with sense, poetry with thought, which looks too 
ambitious thus expressed, so the symbol was preferred." 

* "And beneath upon the hem of it thou shalt make pomegranates of 
blue, and of purple, and of scarlet, round about the hem thereof; and 
bells of gold between them round about ; a golden bell and a pomegran- 
ate, upon the hem of the robe round about." — Exodus, xxviii. 33, 34. 

t Preface to ist edition oi A Soid's Tragedy. 



INTR OD UC TION: 1 1 

These poems were issued in shilling numbers, at irregular 
intervals, and with yellow-paper covers. Paper and type 
were as unattractive as possible. The pages were printed in 
double columns. Little effort was made to interest even the 
small audience which such poems could hope to gain. But 
in spite of this indifference the poems made their way. The 
series included all the Dra7?ias, the Dramatic Lyrics and 
Romances^ and The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed's. 
It will be seen that the material for the present selection is 
largely drawn from Bells and Poi7iegranates. 

In 1850 were published Christmas Eve and Easter Day, 
and in the next ten years the two volumes of short poems — 
Men a?id Women and Dramatis Personce. During these years 
a distinct change took place in the character of Mr. Brown- 
ing's work. He forsook the dramatic form. He wrote brief, 
pointed poems of incident, of character, of emotion, instead 
of the long philosophical meditations of the early period. 
The picturesque aspects of life seem to have laid hold on 
him. Youth and Art, Rabbi Be?t Ezra, " Childe Roland to 
the Dark Tower Came" represent this period in the present 
selection. It is not presumptuous to say that Mrs. Brown- 
ing's influence is evident in all the work of the decade, 
and that the comparative silence of the last part of it was 
due to the eternal silence gathering about the woman the 
poet loved. 

With 1868 began the third and last epoch in Browning's 
work. The Ring and the Book was in a new vein,-^the rich- 
est that he had yet worked. This is no place for an abstract 
or a criticism of this great epic. It was closely followed by 
a dozen poems in the same external style. They are a phil 
osophical presentation of a dramatic motif; The Inn Album, 
Red Cotto7i Night-Cap Country, Fifine at the Fair are like what 
we should expect if a master took the musical situations of a 
great Wagnerian opera and put them into the symphonic 
form. 



1 2 INTRO D UC TfON. 



II. CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE OF BROWNING S CHIEF WORKS. 



1833, Pauline. 
1835, Paracelsus. 
1837, Strafford. 

1840, Sordello. 

1841, Pippa Passes. 

1842, King Victor and King Charles. 
" Drannatic Lyrics. 

1843, The Return of the Druses. 
" A Blot in the Scutcheon. 

1844, Colombe's Birthday. 

1845, The Tomb at St. Praxed's. 
" The Flight of the Duchess. 
" Dramatic Romances. 

" Luria. 

" A Soul's Tragedy. 



1850, Christmas Eve and Easter Day. 
1855, Men and Women. 
1864, Dramatis Personae. 



1868-9, The Ring and the Book. 

187 1, Herve' Riel. 

" Balaustion's Adventure. 

" Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau. 

1872, Fifine at the Fair. 

1873, ^^^ Cotton Night-Cap Country- 

1875, Aristophanes' Apology. 
" The Inn Album. 

1876, Pacchiarotto. 

1877, Agamemnon. 

1878, La Saisiaz. 

" The Two Poets of Croisic. 

1879, Dramatic Idylls (i.). 



INTRODUCTION. I^ 

i8So, Dramatic Idylls (ii.). 

1883, Jocoseria. 

1885, Ferishtah's Fancies. 

III. HELPS TO THE STUDY OF BROWNING. 

The most important works for consultation are, of course, 
the publications of the Browning Society. If not all are ob- 
tainable, the Papers for 188 1-4, Parts i. and 11., are the most 
essential. The lists and references given in these are really 
indispensable. 

A Handbook to Robert Bro7V7ihig, by Mrs. S. Orr, contains 
many valuable facts about the poems. It explains allusions 
accurately. Mrs. Orr's acquaintance with Browning gives 
her a certain reliability in such matters. 

An Introduction to the Study of Browning's Poetry^ by Piof. 
Hiram Corson, contains four most interesting essays on vari- 
ous aspects of the poet's genius. The one on "Browning's 
Obscurity" will be specially useful to the student. 

Studies i?t Literature, by Edward Dowden, and Victorian 
Poets, by E. C. Stedman, have excellent chapters on Brown- 
ing. 

Literary Studies, by Walter Bagehot, has an article com- 
paring Browning and Tennyson. 

The following are the most valuable reviews in periodi- 
cals, in addition to those quoted below. All the latter, ex- 
cept, perhaps, M. Milsand's, will repay a complete reading. 

The Church Quarterly Review, Oct. 1878 (Hon. and Rev. 
Arthur Lyttleton). 

The London Quarterly Review, July, 1869. 

The Co?itef?ipo?'ary Review, Jan. and Feb. 1867. 

The Victoria Magazifie, Feb. 1864 (Moncure D. Conway). 

Finally, the student should not fail to read carefully Brown- 
ing's own Essay on Shelley. It was prefixed to a volume of 
Letters supposed to be by Shelley, but which afterwards 
proved to be spurious. The essay is none the less valuable, 



14 



INTRODUCTION. 



and has been reprinted by the Browning Society in the Pa- 
pers for 1881-4, Part i. p. 3 fol. It defines exactly Browning's 
poetic ideals, and gives us generously his own standard by 
which to measure him. 

IV. CRITICAL COMMENTS ON BROWNING. 

\^From the Introductory Address to the Bj'otvning Society^ by Rev. J. Kirk- 
man, M.A., October 28, 1881.*] 

Browning is undoubtedly the profoundest intellect, with 
widest range of sympathies, and with universal knowledge 
of men and things, that has arisen as a poet since Shake- 
speare. In knowledge of many things he is necessarily supe- 
rior to Shakespeare, as being the all-receptive child of the 
century of science and travel. In carefulness of construc- 
tion, and especially in the genius of constructing drama, he 
claims no comparison with Shakespeare. But his truly Shake- 
spearian genius pre-eminently shines in his power to throw 
his whole intellect and sympathies into the most diverse in- 
dividualities; to think and feel as one of them would, al- 
though undoubtedly glorified by Browning's genius within. 
. . . I said that his profound acquaintance with men and 
things was Shakespearian. I should have emphatically said 
with men, women, and things. Browning's women are as 
wonderful a class almost as Shakespeare's. He understands 
women with perfecter intuition and less uniform rose-color 
than Richter, of whom Browning often reminds us. . . . 

I must claim for Browning the distinction of being pre- 
eminently the greatest Christian poet we have ever had. 
Not in a narrow and dogmatic sense, but as the teacher who 
is thrilled through with all Christian sympathies as with 
artistic or musical. ... I hold very light that solicitude to 
know and tabulate what his own system of truth is. I can 
not sympathize with the intrusive deduction as to what 
Browning himself is. . . . How can you get at Shakespeare, 
* Browning Society Papers, Part II, (London, 1882). 



IN TROD UC TION. r 5 

who is as truly Falstaff as he is King Lear ; lago as much 
as Othello? He is humanity. So is Browning religion; 
with all forms of art, philosophy, and experience as her 
ministers. 

\Ft om Richard Grant White's Introduction to ' * Selections from Browning. ' ' *] 
A poet real and strong is always phenomenal, but Browning 
is the intellectual phenomenon of the last half-century, even 
if he is not the poetical aloe of modern English literature. 
His like we have never seen before. He is not what he is 
by mere excelling. No writer that ever wrouglit out his 
fretted fancies in English verse is the model of him, either in 
large, or in one trait or trick of style. Of the poets of the 
day we can easily see, for example, that William Morris is a 
modern Chaucer; that Tennyson has kindred with all the 
great English verse-makers, and is the ideal maker of correct, 
high-class English poetry of the Victorian era, having about 
him something of the regularity and formality and conven- 
tional properness of an unexceptionable model — a beauty 
like that of a drawing-master's head of a young woman, but 
informed and molded by the expression of noble thoughts; 
that pagan Swinburne is Greek in feeling and Gothic in form, 
and so forth ; but we can not thus compass or classify Brown- 
ing. Were his breadth and his blaze very much less than 
they are, we should still be obliged to look at him as we look 
at a new comet, and set ourselves to considering whence he 
came and whither he is going amid the immensities and the 
eternities. ... In purpose and in style Browning was at 
the very first the Browning he has been these twenty years. 
He has matured in thought, grown richer in experience, and 
obtained by practice a greater mastery over his materials, 
without, however, as I think, using them of late in so pleas- 
ing or even so impressive a manner as of old ; but otherwise 
he is now as a poet, and it would seem as a man, much the 
* New York, 1883. 



1 6 IN TROD UC TION. 

same Robert Browning whose first writings were received 
with little praise and much scoffing, and were pronounced 
harsh, uncouth, affected, and obscure. 

\From a Review of '■'■The Ring ajid the Book,'''' by yohii Morley.*'\ 
We have this long while been so debilitated by pastorals, 
by graceful presentation of the Arthuiian legend for drawing- 
rooms, by idyls, not robust and Theocritean, but such little 
pictures as might adorn a ladies' school, by verse directly 
didactic, that a rude inburst of air from the outside welter of 
human realities is apt to spread a shock which might show 
in what simpleton's paradise we have been living. The little 
ethics of the rectory-parlor set to sweet music, the respectable 
aspirations of the sentimental curate married to exquisite 
verse, the everlasting glorification of domestic sentiment in 
blameless'lDrinces and others, as if that were the poet's single 
province and the divinely appointed end of all art, as if do- 
mestic sentiment included and summed up the whole throng 
of passions, emotions, strife, and desire ; all this would seem 
to be turning us into flat valetudinarians. Our public is be- 
ginning to measure the right and possible in art by the super- 
ficial probabilities of life and manners within a ten-mile ra- 
dius of Charing Cross. Is it likely, asks the critic, that Duke 
Silva would have done this, that Fedalma would have done 
that? Who shall suppose it possible that Caponsacchi acted 
thus, that Count Guido was possessed by devils so? The 
poser is triumphant, because the critic is tacitly appealing 
to the normal standard of probabilities at Bayswater or 
Clapham ; as a man who, having never thought of anything 
mightier or more turbulent than the village brook or horse- 

* Fortnightly Revietv, March, 1869. This powerful review by Mr. 
Morley is based upon The Ring and the Book, but the general introduc- 
tion characterizes so well Browning's work as a whole, that I insert it 
here. It might be applied almost verbatim to Men and Women or to 
Pippa Passes. 



IN TROD UC TION. 1 7 

pond, would most effectively disparage all stories of wreck 
and storni on the great main. . . . [Here] we are taken far 
from the serene and homely region in which some of our 
teachers would fain have it that the whole moral universe 
can be snugly pent up. We see the black passions of men 
at their blackest; hate, so fierce, undiluted, in^placable, pas- 
sionate, as to be hard of conception by our simpler Northern 
natures; cruelty so vindictive, subtle, persistent, deadly, as 
to fill us with a pain almost too great for true art to produce. 
[But] from what at first was sheer murk, there comes out a 
long procession of human figures, infinitely various in form 
and thought, in character and act; a group of men and wom- 
en, eager, passionate, indifferent; tender and ravenous, mean 
and noble, humorous and profound, jovial with prosperity, or 
half-dumb with misery, skirting the central tragedy, or 
plunged deep into the thick of it, passers-by who put them- 
selves off with a glance at the surface of a thing, and another 
or two who dive to the heart of it. And they all come out 
with a certain Shakespearian fulness, vividness, directness. 
Above all, they are every one of them frankly men and wom- 
en, with free play of human life in limb and feature, as in an 
antique sculpture. So much of modern art, in poetry as in 
painting, runs to mere drapery. " I grant," says Lessing, 
" that there is also a beauty in drapery, but can it be com- 
pared with that of the human form ? And shall he who can 
attain the greater, rest content v^rith the less? I much fear 
that the most perfect master in drapery shows by that very 
talent wherein his weakness lies." This was spoken of plas- 
tic art, but it has a yet deeper meaning in poetic criticism. 
There, too, the master is he who presents the natural shape, 
the curves, the thews of men, and does not labor and seek 
praise for faithful reproduction of the mere moral drapery of 
the hour, this or another; who gives you Hercules at strife 
with Antaeus, Laocoon writhing in the coils of the divine 
serpents, the wrestle with circumstance or passion, with out- 



1 8 INTRODUCTION. 

ward destiny or inner character, in the free outlines of nature 
and reality, and not in the outlines of a dress-coat either of 
Victorian or Arthurian time. The capacity which it has for 
this presentation, at once so varied and so direct, is one 
reason why the dramatic form ranks as the highest expres- 
sion and measure of the creative power of the poet; and the 
extraordinary grasp with which Mr. Browning has availed 
himself of this double capacity, is one reason why we should 
reckon The Riftg and the Book as his masterpiece. 

[From RuskiiCs " Modern Paintersy *] 
Robert Browning is unerring in every sentence he writes 
of the Middle Ages \ always vital, right, and profound ; so 
that in the matter of art . . . there is hardly a principle con- 
nected with the mediaeval temper that he has not struck upon 
in those seemingly careless and too rugged rhymes of his. 
There is a curious instance, by the way, in a short poem re- 
ferring to this very subject of tomb and image sculpture ; and 
illustrating just one of those phases of local human character 
which, though belonging to Shakespeare's own age, he never 
noticed, because it was specially Italian and un-English. . . . 
I mean the kind of admiration with which a Southern artist 
regarded the stone he worked in ; and the pride which popu- 
lace or priest took in the possession of precious mountain 
substance, worked into the pavements of their cathedrals 
and the shafts of their tombs. Observe, Shakespeare, in 
the midst of architecture and tombs of wood, or freestone, or 
brass, naturally thinks oi gold as the best enriching and en- 
nobling substance for them ; in the midst, also, of the fever 
of the Renaissance, he writes, as every one else did, in praise 
of precisely the most vicious master of that school — Giulio 
Romano ; but the modern poet, living in Italy, and quit of 
the Renaissance influence, is able fully to enter into the 

* Modern Painters, by John Ruskin (American ed., New York, i86o^ 
vol. iv. p. 359 fol. 



INTR on UC TION. 1 9 

Italian feeling, and to see the evil of the Renaissance 
tendency, not because he is greater than Shakespeare, but 
because he is in another element, and has seen other 
things. ... 

I know no other piece of modern English prose or poetry, 
in which there is so much told, as in these lines [The Bishop 
Orders His Tomb at St. Praxeifs Church^ of the Renaissance 
spirit, — its worldliness, inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, igno- 
rance of itself, love of art, of luxury, and of good Latin. It 
is nearly all I said of the central Renaissance in thirty pages 
of The Stones of Venice put into as many lines. Browning's 
being also the antecedent work. The worst of it is that this 
kind of concentrated writing needs so much solution before 
the reader can fairly get the good of it, that people's patience 
fails them, and they give up the thing as insoluble 3 though, 
truly, it ought to be to the current of common thought like 
Saladin's talisman, dipped in clear water, not soluble alto- 
gether, but making the element medicinal. 

\From yames Russell LowelPs Essay on Browning's Plays and Poems *'\ 
Browning's Dramas are not made up of a number of beau- 
ties, distinct and isolate as pearls, threaded upon the string 
of the plot. Each has a permeating life and spirit of its own. 
When we would break off any fragment, we cannot find one 
which would by itself approach completeness. It is like tear- 
ing away a limb from a living body. For these are works of 
art in the truest sense. They are not aggregations of disso- 
nant beauties, like some modern sculptures, against which 
the Apollo might bring an action of trover for an arm, and 
the Antinoiis for a leg, but pure statues, in which everything 
superfluous has been sternly chiselled away, and whose won- 

* A^orth American Review, April, 1848, p. 374. This extract and the 
following are specially noticeable on account of their date. At least 
two critics recognized Browning's importance as early as 184S and 
1851. 



20 INTRODUCTION. 

derful balance might seem tameness to the ordinary observer, 
who demands strain as an evidence of strength. The char- 
acters in them are not bundles of different characteristics, 
but their gradual development runs through the whole dra- 
ma, and makes the life of it. We do not learn what they are 
by what they say of themselves, or by what is said of them, 
so much as by what they do or leave undone. Nor does 
any drama seem to be written for the display of some one 
character which the author has conceived and makes a fa- 
vorite of. No undue emphasis is laid upon any. Each fills 
his part, and each, in his higher or lower grade, his greater 
or less prominence, is equally necessary to the rest. Above 
all, his personages are not mere mouthpieces for the author's 
idiosyncrasies. , . . His men and women are men and wom- 
en, and not Mr. Browning masquerading in different-colored 
dominoes. We implied as much when we said he was an 
artist. For the artist-period begins precisely at the point 
where the pleasure of expressing self ends, and the poet be- 
comes sensible that his highest duty is to give voice to the 
myriad forms of nature, which, wanting voice, were dumb. 
The term art includes many lower faculties of the poet ; but 
this appears to us its highest and most comprehensive defi- 
nition. Hence Shakespeare, the truest of artists, is also 
nothing more than a voice. . . . 

If we could be sure that our readers would read Mr. Brown- 
ing's poems with the respect and attentive study they de- 
serve, what should hinder us from saying that we think him 
a great poet? However, as the world feels uncomfortably 
somewhere, it can hardly tell how or why, at hearing people 
called great, before it can claim a share in their greatness by 
erecting to them a monument with a monk-Latin inscription 
on it which nine tenths of their countrymen cannot construe, 
and as Mr. Browning must be as yet comparatively a young 
man [1848], we will content ourselves with saying that he 
has in him the elements of greatness. To us he appears to 



INTR OD UC TION. 2 1 

have a wider range and greater freedom of movement than 
any other of the younger English poets. 

{From y. Milsand's " La Poisie Anglaise depuis Byron.'" *] 
What Mr. Browning has produced is great as it stands, 
but he suggests a power even greater than his achievement. 
He speaks like a spirit who is able to do that which has 
been almost impossible in past centuries. The dawning 
soul of man in antiquity (and I suspect that this is symbol- 
ized in Aprile, one of the characters in Paracelsus) saw ob- 
jects isolated, as forms and as visions ; to it, the confused 
and mingled sounds which nature brings to man, expressed 
nothing more than the mere physical effect of their action 
upon the ear; it was limited to distinguishing mere disjoined 
syllables of nature's language. Above . every other, Mr. 
Browning's poetry is that of a new human species, which can 
now distinguish words and construe phrases. He has the 
sort of insight whose peculiar characteristic it is to recognize 
everywhere, not only forms and facts, but their mutual con- 
nections and methods of action. This philosophical power 
which he possesses of seizing subtle and exact relations is 
met with in more than one thinker, it is true ; but he is one 
of the first, if not the first, in whom it has reached such de- 
velopment, without becoming the dominant faculty which 
subordinates all the others. For, strong as it is, it has found 
in his poetic imagination another faculty still stronger, which 
has forced it to work as its purveyor and servant. In this 
lies the essential originality of Mr. Browning. 

{From '■''How the Broiviting Society Cavie into Beings'''' by F. J. Furni- 

vall.W 

But Browning [in his later poems] has evidently made up 
his mind that we shall eat our mutton without currant jelly, 

* Revne des Deux Mondes, vol. xi. (1851), p. 66i. 
t Bro'ivning Society Papers, Part II., London, 1882. 



22 INTRODUCTION. 

our hard biscuits without Narbonne honey. He has not 
deigned in his later works to use the slighter tools of Fancy 
and the like, of which he showed himself a master in his 
earlier ones. With intense earnestness he has gone straight 
to his facts, his reasonings, his dealings with men's souls, 
the meaning of evil, the being of God, and has refused to 
dally with triflings on the road. He has also taken up some 
more repulsively diseased cases of corrupted souls than he 
did in earlier life. But they are only such as he finds here 
on earth, with which the God he believes in deals ; and he 
thinks that the poet whose business is to strive lo see things 
as God sees them, may lawfully set these crimes before his 
fellow-men, not for their enjoyment^ but for their spirits' gain. 
If his clerical readers complain of the change, let the lay 
ones at least be content with it, even if they don't praise it. 
What they lose in Fancy and Beauty, they gain in Subtlety, 
Power, Penetration, and Depth. 

\Froni Dcnvden''s "Studies in Lite7-aUire.''^ *\ 
As we started with the assumption that Mr. Tennyson has 
a vivid feeling of the dignity and potency o^ law, let us as- 
sume, for the present, that Mr. Browning vividly feels the 
importance, the greatness and beauty of passions and en- 
thusiasms, and that his imagination is comparatively unim- 
pressed by the presence of law and its operations. ... It is 
not the order and regularity in the processes of the natural 
world which chiefly delight Mr. Browning's imagination, but 
the streaming forth of power and will and love from the whole 
face of the visible universe. . , . 

But Mr. Browning's most characteristic feeling for nature 
appears in his rendering of those aspects of sky or earth or 
sea, of sunset, or noonday, or dawn, which seem to acquire 
some sudden and passionate significance ; which seem to be 

* Studies in Literature, by Edward Dowden, LL.D. (2d ed., London, 
1882), p. 211 fol. 



INTRODUCTION. 23 

charged with some spiritual secret eager for disclosure ; in 
his rendering of those moments which betray the passion at 
the heart of things, which thrill and tingle with prophetic 
fire. When lightning searches for the guilty lovers, Ottinia 
and Sebald \_Pippa Fasses\ like an angelic sword plunged 
into the gloom, when the tender twilight, with its one chryso- 
lite star, grows aware, and the light and shade make up a 
spell, and the forests by their mystery and sound and si- 
lence mingle together two human lives forever, when the ap- 
parition of the moon-rainbow appears gloriously after the 
storm, and Christ is in his heaven, when to David the stars 
shoot out the pain of pent knowledge and in the gray of the 
hills at morning there dwells a gathered intensity — then 
Nature rises from her sweet ways of use and wont and shows 
herself the Priestess, the Pythoness, the Divinity which she 
is. Or rather, through Nature, the Spirit of God addresses 
itself to the spirit of man. 

If Mr. Tennyson's thinking had any tendency in the direc- 
tion vaguely named pantheistic, it would be towards identi- 
fying God with the order and wisdom of the universe ; if Mr. 
Browning's thinking had such a tendency, it w^ould be tow- 
ards identifying him with the passion, so to speak, of nature. 
In the joy of spring-time God awakens to intenser life : 

*' The lark 
Soars up and up, shivering for very joy ; 
Afar the ocean sleeps ; white fishing gulls 
Flit where the strand is purple with its tribe 
Of nested limpets; savage creatures seek 
Their loves in wood and plain — and God renews 
His ancient rapture !" 

A law of nature means nothing to Mr. Browning if it does 
not mean the immanence of power and will and love. 

Mr. Browning, like Mr. Tennyson, is an optimist, but the 
idea of a progress of mankind enters into his poems in a 
comparatively slight degree. . . . He thinks much less of 



24 



IXTR on UC T/OJV. 



the future of ihe human race and of a terrestrial golden age 
than of the life and destiny of the individual, and of the 
heaven that each man may attain ; and it is in his teaching 
with reference to the growth of the individual and its appro- 
priate means that we find the most characteristic part of Mr. 
Browning's way of thought. ... It seems to him that the 
greatness and glory of man lie not in submission to law, but 
in aspiration to something higher than ourselves; not in 
selfrepression, but in the passion which scorns the limits 
of time and space, and in the bright endeavors towards 
results that are unattainable on earth. 

Man here on earth, according to the central and control- 
ling thought of Mr. Browning, man here in a state of prepa- 
ration for other lives, and surrounded by wondrous spiritual 
influences, is too great for the sphere that contains him, 
while, at the same time, he can exist only by submitting for 
the present to the conditions it imposes ; never without fatal 
loss becoming content with submission, or regarding his 
present state as perfect or final. Our nature here is unfin- 
ished, imperfect, but its glory, its peculiarity, that which 
makes us men — not God, and not brutes — lies precisely in 
this character of imperfection, giving scope as it does for in- 
definite growth and progress — 

" Progress, man's distinctive mark alone, 
Not God's, and not the beasts' ; God is, they are, 
Man partly is, and wholly hopes to be." 

And it is by a succession of failures, stimulating higher aspi- 
rations and endeavours, that we may reach at last 

" the ultimate angels' law, 
Indulging every instinct of the soul, 
There where law, life, joy, impulse, are one thing." ... * 

A man may be guilty of either of two irretrievable errors: 
seduced by temptations of sense, denying the light that is 
in him, yielding to prudential motives, or to supineness of 
* A Death in the Desert, p. 129. 



INTRODUCTION. 25 

heart or brain or hand, he may renounce his spiritual, his 
infinite hfe and its concerns. That is one error. Or he may 
try to force those concerns and corresponding states of 
thought and feeling and endeavor into this finite life — the 
life which is but the starting-point and not the goal. He 
may deny his higher nature, which is ever yearning upward 
to God through all noble forms of thought, emotion, and ac- 
tion ; he may weary of failure which (as generating a higher 
tendency) is his peculiar glory; or else he may deny the 
conditions of finite existence, and attempt to realize in this 
life what must be the achievement of eternity. 

Hence it is not obedience, it is not submission to the law 
of duty, which points out to us our true path of life, but 
rather infinite desire and endless aspiration. Mr. Brown- 
ing's ideal of manhood in this world always recognizes the 
fact that it is the ideal of a creature who never can be per- 
fected on earth, a creature whom other and higher lives 
await in an endless hereafter. . . . Man must not rest con- 
tent with earth and the gifts of earth ; he must not aim at 
"thrusting in time eternity's concern ;" but he must perpetu- 
ally grasp at things attainable by his highest striving, and, 
having attained them, find that they are unsatisfying, so that 
by an endless series of aspirations and endeavors, which 
generate new aspirations and new endeavors, he may be 
sent on to God, and his manifested love, and his eternal 
heaven. ... 

These ideas lead us to the central point from which we 
can perceive the peculiarity and origin of Mr. Browning's 
feeling with regard to external nature, art, religion, love, 
beauty, knowledge. . . . 

Is it of external nature that Mr. Browning speaks? The 
preciousness of all the glory of sky and earth lies in its be- 
ing the manifested power and love of God, to which the 
heart springs as fire. . . . [But] nature has betrayed and 
ruined us if we rest in it ; betrayed and ruined us, unless it 
send us onward unsatisfied to God. 



26 INTRODUCTION. 

And what are Mr. Browning's chief doctrines on the sub- 
ject of Art? . . . The true glory of art is that in its creation 
there arise desires and aspirations never to be satisfied on 
earth, but generating new desires and new aspirations, by 
which the spirit of man mounts to God himself. The artist 
(Mr. Browning loves to insist on this point) who can realize 
in marble or in color or in music his ideal has thereby missed 
the highest gain of art. In Fippa Passes the regeneration of 
the young sculptor's work turns on his finding that in the 
very perfection which he had attained lies ultimate failure. 
And one entire poem, Andrea del Sarto, has been devoted to 
the exposition of this thought. 

" A man's reach should exceed his grasp, 
Or what 's a heaven for ?" . . . 

A large number of Mr. Browning's poems have love for 
their theme; and here again we find the same recurring 
thoughts. . . . The dra77iatis personce of many of Mr. Brown- 
ing's poems fall into two groups — the group of those whose 
souls are saved by love, and the group of those whose souls 
are lost by some worldliness, or cowardice, or faintness of 
heart. The old French academician, too prudent or self- 
restrained to yield to the manifold promptings of nature and 
utter his love, has ruined four lives, which for that sin have 
been condemned to be henceforth respectable and passion- 
less [Dh Aliter Visum]. ... So again in Youth and Art the 
same lesson is enforced. Boy-sculptor and girl-singer after- 
wards to be each successful in the world, the one to be 
wife of " a rich old lord," the other to be " dubbed knight 
and an R. A.," are too prudent to yield to the summons of 
love. And therefore in the deepest sense each has failed : 

" Each life 's unfulfilled you see ; 
It hangs still patchy and scrappy ; 
We have not sighed deep, laughed free, 
Starved, feasted, despaired, been happy." . . - 



IN TROD UC TION. 2 7 

Over against the group of these lost souls who have ab- 
jured or forfeited love stands the group of those whom love 
has purified and saved, pure, it may be, with a radiant spot- 
lessness, or, it may be, soiled and stained with griefs and 
shames and sins, but yet redeemed by love. . . . 

With Mr. Browning the moments are most glorious in 
which the obscure tendency of many years has been revealed 
by the lightning of sudden passion, or in which a resolution 
that changes the current of life has been taken in reliance 
upon that insight which vivid emotion bestows ; and those 
periods of our history are charged most fully with moral pur- 
pose which take their direction from moments such as these. 
We cannot always burn with the ecstasy, we cannot always 
retain the vision. Our own languors and lethargy spread a 
mist over the soul, or the world with its prudential motives 
and sage provisos, and chicane of counsels of moderation, 
tempts us to distrust the voice of every transcendent passion. 
But even in the hour of faithlessness, if we can cling blindly 
to the facts revealed in the vanished moment of inspiration 
we shall be saved. 

*' Oh, we're sunk enough here, God knows ! 
But not quite so sunk that moments 
Sure though seldom are denied us, 
When the spirit's true endowments 
Stand out plainly from its false ones, 
And apprise it if pursuing 
Or the right way or the wrong way, 
To its triumph or undoing. 

" There are flashes struck from midnights, 
There are fire-flames noondays kindle. 
Whereby piled-up honors perish, 
Whereby swollen ambitions dwindle, 
While just this or that poor impulse, 
Which for once had play unstifled, 
Seems the sole work of a lifetime 
That away the rest have trifled." 



2 8 INTR OD UC TIOiV. 

[From Switibiirne' s Essay on George Chapman'' s IVoris*] 

The charge of obscurity is perhaps of all charges the like- 
liest to impair the fame or to imperil the success of a rising 
or an established poet. It is as often misapplied by hasty 
or ignorant criticism as any other on the roll of accusations, 
and was never misapplied more persistently and perversely 
than to an eminent writer of our own time. The difficulty 
found by many in certain of Mr. Browning's works arises 
from a quality the very reverse of that which produces ob- 
scurity, properly so called. Obscurity is the natural product 
of turbid forces and confused ideas ; of a feeble and clouded 
or of a vigorous but untixed and chaotic intellect . . . Now 
if there is any great quality more perceptible than another 
in Mr. Browning's intellect it is his decisive and incisive 
faculty of thought, his sureness and intensity of perception, 
his rapid and trenchant resolution of aim. To charge him 
with obscurity is about as accurate as to call Lynceus pur- 
blind or complain of the sluggish action of the telegraphic 
wire. He is something too much the reverse of obscure. . . . 
He never thinks but at full speed ; and the rate of his thought 
is to that of another man's, as the speed of a railway to 
that of a wagon, or the speed of a telegraph to that of 
a railway. It is hopeless to enjoy the charm or to appre- 
hend the gist of his writings except with a mind thoroughly 
alert, an attention awake on all points, a spirit open and 
ready to be kindled by the contact of the writer's. . . . The 
proper mood in which to study for the first time a book of 
Mr. Browning's is the freshest, clearest, most active mood of 
the mind in its brightest and keenest hours of work. . . . 
The very essence of Mr. Browning's aim and method, as ex- 
hibited in the ripest fruits of his intelligence, is such as im- 

* Essay on the Poetical and Dramatic Works of George Chapman. By 
Algernon Charles Swinburne. Introduction to Works of Chapman 
(London, 1875). 



introduction: 29 

plies above all other things the possession of a quality the 
very opposite of obscurity — a faculty of spiritual illumination 
rapid and intense and subtle as lightning, which brings to 
bear upon its central object by way of direct and vivid illus- 
tration every symbol and every detail on which its light is 
flashed in passing. 

jN^oi'E. — We talk glibly about the canons of art. We have long be- 
lieved that beauty of form, careful refinement of phrase to thought, logi- 
cal adaptation of details to each other, clear simplicity of expression, are 
essential to the immortality of a work of art. The demand for beauty 
has gone even farther. Certainly one writer * of the past decade has said 
that in exact proportion as the beauty of form transcends the excellence 
of matter, will a work gain the admiration of posterity. It seems true 
that when a great thinker has disregarded conventional canons of ex- 
pression his work as such has fallen into neglect, and his thought has 
passed into other hands more skilful to perpetuate it. Now it may as 
well be confessed at the outset of any study of Browning that he does 
not observe the methods which have been evolved by the years as most 
effective for the embodiment of thought. We must grant also that this 
is a conscious and deliberate act. A man who can command music like 
that in the Song from A Blot in the 'Scutcheon, or vigor like that in Cav- 
alier Tunes, is not forced to express himself so blindly as in the last ten 
lines of the Invocation from The Ring and the Book, or so harshly as in 
Red Cotton Night-Cap Country. He chooses so to express himself. Many 
of his shorter poems not included in this selection, as, for example, Pop- 
ularity, Life in a Love, Love in a Life, Another Way of Love, etc., are to- 
tally unintelligible to the man who reads Shakespeare with delight and 
Wordsworth with appreciation. But Browning knows English poetry 
as few of his critics know it. He knows, also, how to make smooth 
verse which shall tell its story to him who runs. Granting these facts, 
it is no more than fair that we treat with respect both the poet and his 
large following, and ask if our notions about art may not need recon- 
struction. Perhaps we have become both finical and lazy. Perhaps, too, 
we scarcely realize the novel conditions under which the poet of this 
century works. The knowledge, the experiences, the complicated emo- 
tions, the responsibilities accumulating in the life of the world since the 
days of Homer, are thrust into his arms. Is it wonder that he staggers 
under the burden, and that his speech comes haltingly from his lips ? 

* Dr. John Bascom. in his Phiiosophy of EnjlisJi Literature. 



30 



INTR on UC TION. 



Another fact needs recall. Browning is not the calm high-priest of 
humanity, as was Shakespeare. He is rather a prophet. He has a new, 
strange message which he scarcely understands himself. But he must 
utter it. It may be that it will pass into the life of the world and be 
absorbed there, rather than find its way into the treasure-house of the 
world's art. But to this ultimate test at least it answers : it moves men. 
We may parody Browning's style, we may question the novelty of his 
thought, we may deny his artistic power ; but the fact remains that a 
large number of men and women of his race to-day— many of whom do 
not belong to the Browning Society— find in him their greatest inspira- 
tion to high, divine, and noble thinking. 

"And this I know: whether the one true light 
Kindle to Love, or Wrath consume me quite, 
One flash of It within the Tavern caught 
Better than in the Temple lost outright." * 



H. E. H. 



* The Rubaiydt, by Omar Khayyam, stanza 36. 




SELECT POEMS OF ROBERT BROWNING. 



Or from Browning some 'Pomegranate,' \vliic1i, if cut deep down the 

middle, 
Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity. 

Elizabeth Barrett (Browning). 

I do heartily desire the spread of the study and the influence of Rob- 
ert Browning ; for, having lived some years with Chaucer and Shakspere, 
to try and know what a Man is, and what a Boet is, I declare my convic- 
tion that Browning is the manliest, the strongest, the lifefullest, the deep- 
est, and thonghtfullest living poet, the one most needing earnest study, 
and the one most worthy of it. — F. J. Furnivall. 



HERVE RIEL. 

I. 

On the sea and at the Hogue, sixteen hundred ninety-two, 
Did the English fight the French — woe to France ! 

And, the thirty-first of May, helter-skelter thro' the blue, 

Like a crowd of frightened porpoises a shoal of sharks pur- 
sue. 
Came crowding ship on ship to St. Malo on the Ranee, 

With the English fleet in view. 6 

II. 
'T was the squadron that escaped, with the victor in full 
chase ; 
First and foremost of the drove, in his great ship, Dam- 
freville: 
Close on him fled, great and small, 
Twenty-two good ships in all ; lo 

And they signalled to the place, 
'Help the winners of a race! 

Get us guidance, give us harbour, take us quick — or, 

quicker still, 
Here 's the English can and will !' 

Ill, 
Then the pilots of the place put out brisk and leapt on 
board ; ^s 

'Why, what hope or chance have ships like these to 
pass V laughed they : 

3 



34 ROBERT BROWNING. 

* Rocks to starboard, rocks to port, all the passage scarred 

and scored, 
Shall the Formidable here with her twelve and eighty guns 
Think to make the river-mouth by the single narrow way, 
Trust to enter where 't is ticklish for a craft of twenty tons, 20 
And with flow at full beside? 
Now, 't is slackest ebb of tide. 
Reach the mooring? Rather say, 
While rock stands or water runs, 

Not a ship will leave the bay!' 25 

IV. 

Then was called a council straight. 

Brief and bitter the debate: 

'Here's the English at our heels; would you have them 

take in low 
All that 's left us of the fleet, linked together stern and bow. 
For a prize to Plymouth Sound ? 30 

Better run the ships aground !' 

(Ended Damfreville his speech). 
Not a minute more to wait ! 

'Let the Captains all and each 

Shove ashore, then blow up, burn the vessels on the 
beach ! 35 

France must undergo her fiite. 

V, 

Give the word !' But no such word 

Was ever spoke or heard ; 

For up stood, for out stepped, for in struck amid all these — 

A captain ? A lieutenant ? A mate — first, second, third ? 

No such man of m.aik, and meet 41 

With his betters to compete ! 

But a simple Breton sailor pressed by Tourville for the 
fleet, 
A poor coasting-pilot he, Herve Riel the Croisickese. 



NERVE RIEL. 



35 



VI. 

And, 'What mockery or malice have we here?' cries Herve' 
Kiel : 45 

' Are you mad, you Malouins ? Are you cowards, fools, 
or rogues? 
Talk to me of rocks and shoals, me who took the sound- 
ings, tell 
On my fingers every bank, every shallow, every swell 
'Twixt the offing here and Greve, where the river dis- 
embogues ? 
Are you bought by English gold ? Is it love the lying 's for? 
Morn and eve, night and day, 51 

Have I piloted your bay. 
Entered free and anchored fast at the foot of Solidor. 
Burn the fleet and ruin France? That were worse than 
fifty Hogues !' 
Sirs, they know I speak the truth ! Sirs, believe me 
there 's a way ! 55 

Only let me lead the line. 

Have the biggest ship to steer, 
Get this Fonnidabk clear. 
Make the others follow mine, 

And I lead them, most and least, by a passage I know well, 
Right to Solidor past Greve, 61 

And there lay them safe and sound j 
And if one ship misbehave, 

Keel so much as grate the ground, 
Why, 1 've nothing but my life — here 's my h^ad !' cries 
Herve Riel. 65 

VII. 

Not a minute more to wait. 

' Steer us in, then, small and great ! 



26 ROBERT BROWNIA'G. 

Take the helm, lead the line, save the squadron !' cried 
its chief. 
Captains, give the sailor place ! 

He is Admiral, in brief. 70 

Still the north-wind, by God's grace ! 
See the noble fellow's face 
As the big ship, with a bound. 
Clears the entry like a hound. 

Keeps the passage as its inch of way were the wide sea's 
profound ! 75 

See, safe thro' shoal and rock. 

How they follow in a flock. 
Not a ship that misbehaves, not a keel that grates the ground, 

Not a spar that comes to grief! 
The peril, see, is past, 80 

All are harboured to the last, 

And just as Herve Riel hollas 'Anchor!' — sure as fate 
Up the English come, too late ! 

VIII. 

So, the storm subsides to calm : 

They see the green trees wave 85 

On the heights o'erlooking Greve. 
Hearts that bled are stanched with balm. 
'Just our rapture to enhance. 

Let the English rake the bay. 
Gnash their teeth and glare askance "90 

As they cannonade away ! 
'Neath rampired Solidor pleasant riding on the Ranee !' 
How hope succeeds despair on each captain's counte- 
nance! 
Out burst all with one accord, 

' This is Paradise for Hell 1 95 

Let France, let France's King 
Thank the man that did the thing !' 



HERVE KIEL. 3^ 

What a shout, and all one word, 

'Herve Riel !' 
As he stepped in front once more, loo 

Not a symptom of surprise 

In the frank blue Breton eyes, 
Just the same man as before. 

IX. 

Then said Damfreville, ' My friend, 

I must speak out at the end, 105 

Though I find the speaking hard. 
Praise is deeper than the lips : 
You have saved the King his ships, 

You must name your own reward. 
'Faith, our sun was near eclipse ! no 

Demand whate'er you will, 
France remains your debtor still. 

Ask to heart's content and have ! or my name 's not Dam- 
freville.' 

X. 

Then a beam of fun outbroke 

On the bearded mouth that spoke, 115 

As the honest heart laughed through 

Those frank eyes of Breton blue : 

' Since I needs must say my say, 

Since on board the duty 's done, 

And from Malo Roads to Croisic Point, what is it but 
a run ? — 120 

Since 't is ask and have, I may — 

Since the others go ashore — 
Come ! A good whole holiday ! 

Leave to go and see my wife, whom I call the Belle 
Aurore !' 

That he asked and that he got — nothing more. 125 



38 



ROBER T BRO PVAV.VG. 



XI. 

Name and deed alike are lost : 
Not a pillar nor a post 

In his Croisic keeps alive the feat as it befell; 
Not a head in white and black 

On a single fishing smack, 130 

In memory of the man but for whom had gone to wrack 

All that France saved from the fight whence England 
bore the bell. 
Go to Paris : rank on rank 

Search the heroes flung pell-mell 
On the Louvre, face and flank ! 135 

You shall look long enough ere you come to Herve Riel. 
So, for better and for worse, 
Herve Riel, accept my verse! 
In my verse, Herve Kiel, do thou once more 
Save the squadron, honour France, love thy wife the Belle 
Aurore ! 140 




CLIVE. 

I and Clive were friends — and why not ? Friends ! I think 

you laugh, my lad. 
Clive it was gave England India, while your father gives, 

egad ! 
England nothing but the graceless boy who lures him on to 

speak — 
'Well, sir, you and Clive were comrades' — with a tongue 

thrust in your cheek ! 
Very true : in my eyes, your eyes, all the world's eyes, Clive 

was man, 5 

I was, am, and ever shall be — mouse, nay, mouse of all its 

clan 
Sorriest sample, if you take the kitchen's estimate for fame; 
While the man Clive — he fought Plassy, spoiled the clever 

foreign game, 
Conquered and annexed and Englished ! Never mind ! As 

o'er my punch 
(You away) I sit of evenings, — silence, save for biscuit 

crunch, lo 

Black, unbroken, — thought grows busy, thrids each pathway 

of old years. 
Notes this forthright, that meander, till the long-past life ap- 
pears 
Like an outsprtad map of country plodded through, each 

mile and rood. 
Once, and well remembered still, — I 'm startled in my soli- 
tude 



40 ROBERT BROWNING. 

Ever and anon by — what's the sudden mocking light that 
breaks 15 

On me as I slap the table till no rummer-glass but shakes 

While I ask — aloud, I do believe, God help me! — 'Was it 
thus? 

Can it be that so I faltered, stopped when just one step for 

US'— 

(Us, — you were not born, I grant, but surely some day born 

would be) — 
* One bold step had gained a province ' (figurative talk, 

you see), 
' Got no end of wealth and honour, — yet I stood stock still 

no less ?' — 
'For I was not Clive/ you comment: but it needs no 

Clive to guess 
Wealth were handy, honour ticklish, did no writing on the 

wall 
Warn me 'Trespasser, 'ware man-traps!' Him who braves 

that notice — call 
Hero ! None of such heroics suit myself who read plain 

words, 25 

Doff my hat, and leap no barrier. Scripture says the land 's 

the Lord's : 
Louts then — what avail the thousand, noisy in a smock- 

frocked ring. 
All agog to have, me trespass, clear the fence, be Clive, their 

king? 
Higher warrant must you show me ere I set one foot be- 
fore 
T' other in that dark direction, though I stand forever- 
more 30 
Poor as Job and meek as Moses. Evermore ? No ! By and 

by 
Job grows rich and Moses valiant, Clive turns out less wise 

than L 



CLIVE. 4 J 

Don't object 'Why call him friend, then?' Power is power, 

my boy, and still 
Marks a man, — God's gift magnific, exercised for good or 

ill. 
You 've your boot now on my hearth-rug, tread what was a 

tiger's skin : 35 

Rarely such a royal monster as I lodged the bullet in ! 
True, he murdered half a village, so his own death came to 

pass ; 
Still for size and beauty, cunning, courage — ah, the brute he 

was! 
Why, that Clive, that youth, that greenhorn, that quill-driving 

clerk, in fine, — 
He sustained a siege in Arcot — But the world knows ! 

Pass the wine. 40 

Where did I break off at? How bring Clive in? Oh, you 

mentioned ' fear' ! 
Just so : and, said I, that minds me of a story you shall hear. 

We were friends then, Clive and I ; so, when the clouds, 
about the orb 

Late supreme, encroaching slowly, surely, threatened to ab- 
sorb 

Ray by ray its noontide brilliance, — friendship might, with 
steadier eye 45 

Drawing near, bear what had burned else, now no blaze, all 
majesty. 

Too much bee's-wing floats my figure ? Well, suppose a 
castle 's new : 

None presume to climb its ramparts, none find foothold sure 
for shoe 

'Twixt those squares and squares of granite plating the im- 
pervious pile 

As his scale-mail's warty iron cuirasses a crocodile. 50 



42 



ROBERT BROWNING. 



Reels that castle thunder-smitten, storm-dismantled ? From 
without 

Scrambling up by crack and crevice, every cockney prates 
about 

Towers — the heap he kicks now ! turrets — ^just the measure 
of his cane ! 

Will that do? Observe, moreover — (same similitude again) — 

Such a castle seldom tumbles by sheer stress of cannonade: 

'T is when foes are foiled and fighting's finished that vile 
rains invade, 56 

Grass o'ergrows, o'ergrows till night-birds congregating find 
no holes 

Fit to build in like the topmost sockets made for banner-poles. 

So Clive crumbled slow at London, crashed at last. A week 
before, 

Dining with him, — after trying churchyard-chat of days of 
yore, — 60 

Both of us stopped, tired as tombstones, head-piece, foot- 
piece, where they lean 

Each to other, drowsed in fog-smoke, o'er a coffined Past 
between. 

As I saw his head sink heavy, guessed the soul's extinguish- 
ment 

By the glazing eyeball, noticed how the furtive fingers went 

Where a drug-box skulked behind the honest liquor, — ' One 
more throw 65 

Try for Clive !' thought I : ' Let 's venture some good rat- 
tling question !' So — 

' Come, Clive, tell us ' — out I blurted — ' what to tell in turn, 
years hence, 

When my boy — suppose I have one — asks me on what evi- 
dence 

I maintain my friend of Plassy proved a warrior every whit 

Worth your Alexanders, Caesars, Marlboroughs, and — what 
said Pitt? — 70 



CLIVE. 43 

Frederick the Fierce himself! Clive told me once — I want 
to say — 

Which feat out of all those famous doings bore the bell away — 

In his own calm estimation, mark you, not the mob's rough 
guess — 

Which stood foremost as evincing what Clive called cour- 
ageousness ? 

Come ! what moment of the minute, what speck-centre in 
the wide 75 

Circle of the action saw your mortal fairly deified? 

(Let alone that filthy sleep-stuff, swallow bold this whole- 
some Port !) 

If a friend has leave to question, — when were you most 
brave, in short ?' 

Up he arched his brows o' the instant, formidably Clive 

again. 
' When was I most brave ? I 'd answer, w^ere the instance 

half as plain 80 

As another instance that 's a brain-lodged crystal — curse it ! 

— here 
Freezing when my memory touches — ugh ! — the time I felt 

almost fear. 
Ugh ! I can not say for certain if I showed fear — anyhow. 
Fear I felt, and, very likely, shuddered, since I shiver now.' 

' Fear,' smiled I. ' Well, that 's the rarer : that 's a speci- 
men to seek, 85 

Ticket up in one's museum. Mind- Freaks^ Lord dive's 
Fear. Unique /' 

Down his brows dropped. On the table painfully he pored 

as though 
Tracing in the stains and streaks there, thoughts encrusted 

long ago. 



44 



ROBERT BROWNING. 



When he spoke 't was like a lawyer reading word by word 
some will, 89 

Some blind jungle of a statement, — beating on and on until 
Out there leaps fierce life to fight with. 

' This fell in my factor-days. 
Desk-drudge, slaving at St. David's, one must game, or drink, 

or craze. 
I chose gaming: and, — because your high-flown gamesters 

hardly take 
Umbrage at a factor's elbow if the factor pays his stake, — 
I was winked at in a circle where the company was choice. 
Captain This and Major That, men high of colour, loud of 

voice, 96 

Yet indulgent, condescending to the modest juvenile 
Who not merely risked but lost his hard-earned guineas with 

a smile. 
Down I sat to cards, one evening, — had for my antagonist 
Somebody whose name 's a secret — you '11 know why — so, 

if you list, 100 

Call him Cock o' the Walk, my scarlet son of Mars from 

head to heel ! 
Play commenced ; and whether Cocky fancied that a clerk 

must feel 
Quite sufficient honour came of bending over one green 

baize, 
I the scribe with him the warrior, guessed no penman dared 

to raise 
Shadow of objection should the honour stay but playing end 
More or less abruptly, — whether disinclined he grew to 

spend 106 

Practice strictly scientific on a booby born to stare 
At — not ask of — lace-and-ruffies if the hand they hide plays 

fair, — 
Anyhow, I marked a movement when he bade me "Cut!" 



CLIVE. 45 

I rose. 
" Such the new manceuvre, Captain ? I'm a novice : knowl- 
edge grows. "° 
What, you force a card, you cheat, sir?" 

Never did a thunder-clap 
Cause emotion, startle Thyrsis locked with Chloe in his lap, 
As my word and gesture (down I flung my cards to join the 

pack) 
Fired the man of arms, whose visage simply red before, 

turned black. 
When he found his voice, he stammered, "That expression 

once again !" "5 

" Well, you forced a card and cheated !" 

" Possibly a factor's brain. 

Busied with his all-important balance of accounts, may deem 

Weighing words superfluous trouble : cheat to clerkly ears 
may seem 

Just the joke for friends to venture ; but we are not friends, 
you see 1 

When a gentleman is joked with,— if he 's good at repar- 
tee. 

He rejoins as I do— Sirrah, on your knees, withdraw in full ! 

Beg my pardon, or be sure a kindly bullet through your 
skull 

Lets in light and teaches manners to what brain it finds ! 
Choose quick — 

Have your life snuffed out or, kneeling, pray me trim yon 
candle-wick !" 

"Well, you cheated !" 

Then outbroke a howl from all the friends around. 

To his feet sprang each in fury, fists were clenched and teeth 

were ground. ^^^ 



46 ROBERT BROWNING. 

'' End it ! no time like the present ! Captain, yours were our 

disgrace ! 
No delay, begin and finish ! Stand back, leave the pair a 

space ! 
Let civilians be instructed ; henceforth simply ply the pen, 
Fly the sword! This clerk 's no swordsman! Suit him 

with a pistol, then ! 130 

Even odds ! A dozen paces 'twixt the most and least 

expert 
Make a dwarf a giant's equal : nay, the dwarf, if he 's alert. 
Likelier hits the broader target !" 

Up we stood accordingly. 
As they handed me the weapon, such was my soul's thirst 

to try 
Then and there conclusions with this bully, tread on and 

stamp out 135 

Every spark of his existence, that, — crept close to, curled 

about 
By that toying, tempting, teazing fool - forefinger's middle 

joint, — 
Do n't you guess ? — the trigger yielded. Gone my chance ! 

and at the point 
Of such prime success moreover: scarce an inch above his 

head 
Went my ball to hit the wainscot. He was living, I was 

dead. 140 

Up he marched in flaming triumph — 't was his right, mind ! — 
up, within 

Just an arm's-length. " Now, my clerkling," chuckled Cocky 
with a grin 

As the levelled piece quite touched me. "Now, Sir Count- 
ing-House, repeat 

That expression which I told you proved bad manners ! 
Did I cheat ?" 



CLIVE. 47 

" Cheat you did, you knew you cheated, and, this moment, 
know as well, 145 

As for me, my homely breeding bids you — fire and go to 
hell !" 

Twice the muzzle touched my forehead. Heavy barrel, 

flurried wrist, 
Either spoils a steady lifting. Thrice : then, " Laugh at hell 

who list, 
I can't ! God 's no fable, either. Did this boy's eye wink 

once ? No ! 
There 's no standing him and hell and God all three against 

me, — so, 150 

I did cheat !" 

And down he threw the pistol, out rushed — by the door 
Possibly, but, as for knowledge if by chimney, roof, or floor, 
He effected disappearance — I '11 engage no glance was sent 
That way by a single starer, such a blank astonishment 
Swallowed up the senses : as for speaking — mute they stood 

as mice. 155 

Mute not long, though ! Such reaction, such a hubbub in 
a trice ! 

" Rogue and rascal ! Who 'd have thought it ? What 's to 
be expected next, 

When His Majesty's Commission serves a sharper as pre- 
text 

For — but where 's the need of wasting time now? Nought 
requires delay : 

Punishment the Service cries for ; let disgrace be wiped 
away 160 

Publicly, in good broad daylight ! Resignation t No, in- 
deed ! 

Drum and fife must play the Rogue's March, rank and file 
be free to speed 



48 ROBERT BROWNING. 

Tardy marching on the rogue's part by appliance in the 

rear — 
Kicks administered shall right this wronged civilian, — never 

fear, 
Mister Clive — for — though a clerk — you bore yourself — sup- 
pose we say — 165 
Just as would beseem a soldier!" 

" Gentlemen, attention— pray ! 
First, one word !" 

I passed each speaker severally in review. 
When I had precise their number, names, and styles, and 

fully knew 
Over whom my supervision thenceforth must extend — why, 

then, — 
" Some five minutes since, my life lay — as you all saw, gen- 
tlemen, 170 
At the mercy of your friend there. Not a single voice was 

raised 
In arrest of judgment, not one tongue — before my powder 

blazed— 
Ventured, ' Can it be the 3'oungster blundered, really seemed 

to mark 
Some irregular proceeding? We conjecture in the dark. 
Guess at random, — still, for sake of fair play — what if for a 

freak, 175 

In a fit of absence, — such things have been ! — if our friend 

proved weak — 
What's the phrase? — corrected fortune! Look into the 

case, at least I' 
Who dared interpose between the altar's victim and the 

priest ? 
Yet he spared me ! You eleven ! Whosoever, all or each, 
Utters — to the disadvantage of the man who spared me — 

speech — iSo 

To his face, behind his back,— that speaker has to do with me j 



CLIVE. 49 

Me who promise, if positions change and mine the chance 

should be, 
Not to imitate your friend and waive advantage !" 

Twenty-five 
Years ago this matter happened : and 't is certain,' added 

Clive, 184 

' Never, to my knowledge, did Sir Cocky have a single breath 
Breathed against him ; lips were closed throughout his life, 

or since his death, 
For if he be dead or living I can tell no more than you. 
All I know is — Cocky had one chance more ; how he used 

it, — grew 
Out of such unlucky habits, or relapsed, and back again 189 
Brought the late-ejected devil with a score more in his train, — • 
That 's for you to judge. Reprieval I procured, at any rate. 
Ugh — the memory of that minute's fear makes gooseflesh 

rise ! Why prate 
Longer? You 've my story, there 's your instance: fear I 

did, you see !' 

'Weir — I hardly kept from laughing — * if I see it, thanks 

must be 
Wholly to your lordship's candour. Not that — in a common 

case — 195 

When a bully caught at cheating thrusts a pistol in one's 

face, 
I should underrate, believe me, such a trial to the nerve ! 
'T is no joke, at one-and-twenty, for a youth to stand nor 

swerve. 
Fear I naturally look for — unless, of all men alive, 199 

I am forced to make exception when I come to Robert Clive, 
Since at Arcot, Plassy, elsewhere, he and death — the whole 

world knows — 
Came to somewhat closer quarters.' 

4 



5° 



ROBERT BROWNING. 



Quarters ? Had we come to blows, 
Clive and I, you had not wondered — up he sprang so, out he 

rapped 
Such a round of oaths — no matter ! I'll endeavour to adapt 
To our modern usage words he — well, 't was friendly license 

— flung 205 

At me like so many fire-balls, fast as he could wag his tongue. 

'You — a soldier? You — at Plassy? Yours the faculty to 

nick 
Instantaneously occasion when your foe, if lightning quick, 
At his mercy, at his malice, has you, through some stupid 

inch 
Undefended in your bulwark? Thus laid open, — not to 

flinch — 210 

That needs courage you '11 concede me. Then, look here ! 

Suppose the man. 
Checking his advance, his weapon still extended, not a span 
Distant from my temple, — curse him ! — quietly had bade me 

" There \ 
Keep your life, calumniator ! — worthless life I freely spare : 
Mine you freely would have taken — murdered me and my 

good fame 215 

Both at once — and all the better ! Go, and thank your own 

bad aim 
Which permits me to forgive you !" What if, with such words 

as these, 
He had cast away his weapon ? How should I have borne 

me, please? •* 
Nay, I 'II .spare you pains and tell you. This, and only this, 

remained — 219 

Pick his weapon up and use it on myself. I so had gained 
Sleep the earlier, leaving England probably to pay on still 
Rent and taxes for half India, tenant at the Frenchman's 

will.' 



CLIVE. 5 1 

*Such the turn,' said I, 'the matter takes with you? Then 

I abate — 
No, by not one jot nor tittle, — of your act my estimate. 
Fear — I wish I could detect there: courage fronts me, plain 

enough — 225 

Call it desperation, madness — never mind ! for here 's in 

rough — 
Why, had mine been such a trial, fear had overcome disgrace. 
True, disgrace were hard to bear ; but such rush against 

God's face — 
None of that for me. Lord Plassy, since I go to church at 

times, 
Say the creed my mother taught me ! Many years in foreign 

climes 230 

Rub some marks away— not all, though ! We poor sinners 

reach life's brink. 
Overlook what rolls beneath it, recklessly enough, but think 
lliere 's advantage in what 's left us — ground to stand on, 

time to call 
"Lord, have mercy 1" ere we topple over — do not leap, that's 

all !' 234 

Oh, he made no answer, re-absorbed into his cloud. I caught 
Something like 'Yes— courage : only fools will call it fear.' 

If aught 
Comfort you, my great unhappy hero Clive, in that I heard 
Next week, how your own hand dealt you doom, and uttered 

just the word 
'Fearfully courageous !'— this, be sure, and nothing else I 

groaned. 
I'm no Clive, nor parson either: dive's worst deed — we'll 

hope condoned. 240 



HOW THEY BROUGHT THE GOOD 
NEWS FROM GHENT TO AIX.' 

[i6-.] 



I SPRANG to the stirrup, and Joris, and he; 

I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three; 

'Good speed !' cried the watch, as the gate-bolts undrew; 

' Speed !' echoed the wall to us galloping through; 

Behind shut the postern, the lights sank to rest, 

And into the midnight we galloped abreast. 

II. 
Not a word to each other; we kept the great pace 
Neck by neck, stride by stride, never changing our place; 
I turned in my saddle and made its girths tight, 
Then shortened each stirrup, and set the pique right, k 

Rebuckled the cheek-strap, chained slacker the bit, 
Nor galloped less steadily Roland a whit. 

III. 

'T was moonset at starting; but while we drew near 

Lokeren, the cocks crew and twilight dawned clear; 

At Boom, a great yellow star came out to see ; i< 

At Diiffeld, 't was morning as plain as could be; 

And from Mecheln church-steeple we heard the half chime, 

So Joris broke silence with, ' Yet there is time !' 



HOW THEY BROUGHT THE GOOD A'EWS: 53 



IV. 

At Aerschot, up leaped of a sudden the sun, 

And against him the cattte stood black every one, 20 

To stare thro' the mist at us galloping past, 

And I saw my stout galloper Roland at last, 

With resolute shoulders, each butting away 

The haze, as some bluff river headland its spray : 

V. 

And his low head and crest, just one sharp ear bent back 25 

For my voice, and the other pricked out on his track ; 

And one eye's black intelligence, — ever that glance 

O'er its white edge at me, his own master, askance ! 

And the thick heavy spume-flakes which aye and anon 

His fierce lips shook upwards in galloping on. 30 



VI. 

By Hasselt, Dirck groaned; and cried Joris ' Stay spur ! 
Your Roos galloped bravely, the fault 's not in her, 
We '11 remember at Aix' — for one heard the quick wheeze 
Of her chest, saw the stretched neck and staggering knees. 
And sunk tail, and horrible heave of the flank, 3S 

As down on her haunches she shuddered and sank. 



VII. 

So we were left galloping, Joris and I, 

Past Looz and past Tongres, no cloud in the sky ; 

The broad sun above laughed a pitiless laugh, 

'Neath our feet broke the brittle bright stubble like chafl"; 40 

Till over by Dalhem a dome-spire sprang white, 

And ' Gallop,' gasped Joris, ' for Aix is in sight ! 



54 



ROBERT BROWNING. 



VIII. 

How they *11 greet us !' — and all in a moment his roan 

Rolled neck and croup over, lay dead as a stone; 

And there was my Roland to bear the whole weight 45 

Of the news which alone could save Aix from her fate, 

With his nostrils like pits full of blood to the brim, 

And with circles of red for his eye-sockets' rim. 

IX. 

Then I cast loose my buff-coat, each holster let fall, 

Shook off both my jack-boots, let go belt and all, 5° 

Stood up in the stirrup, leaned, patted his ear, 

Called my Roland his pet-name, my horse without peer; 

Clapped my hands, laughed and sang, any noise, bad or 

good, 
Till at length into Aix Roland galloped and stood. 

X. 

And all I remember is, friends flocking round 55 

As I sat with his head 'twixt my knees on the ground ; 
And no voice but was praising this Roland of mine, 
As I poured down his throat our last measure of wine, 
Which (the burgesses voted by common consent) 
Was no more than his due who brought good news from 
Ghent. 60 




THE LOST LEADER. 



Just for a handful of silver he left us, 

Just for a riband to stick in his coat — 
Found the one gift of which fortune bereft us, 

Lost all the others, she lets us devote; 
They, with the gold to give, doled him out silver, s 

So much was theirs who so little allowed: 
How all our copper had gone for his service ! 

Rfvgs — were they purple, his heart had been proud ! 
We that had loved him so, followed him, honoured him, 

Lived in his mild and magnificent eye, 
Learned his great language, caught his clear accents, 

Made him our pattern to live and to die ! 
Shakespeare was of us, Milton was for us, 

Burns, Shelley, were witli us, — they watch from their 
graves ! 
He alone breaks from the van and the freemen, is 

He alone sinks to the rear and the slaves ! 



II. 



We shall march prospering,— not thro' his presence; 

Songs may inspirit us, — not from his lyre ; 
Deeds will be done, — while he boasts his quiescence. 

Still bidding crouch whom the rest bade aspire. 20 

Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more. 

One task more declined, one more footpath untrod, 
One more devil's-triumph and sorrow for angels, 

One wrong more to man, one more insult to God ! 



56 



ROBERT BRO WIVING. 



Life's night begins: let him never come back to us ! 

There would be doubt, hesitation, and pain, 
Forced praise on our part — the glimmer of twilight, 

Never glad confident morning again ! 
Best fight on well, for we taught him — strike gallantly, 

Menace our heart ere we master his own; 
Then let him receive the new knowledge and wait us, 

Pardoned in heaven, the first by the throne ! 




THE BISHOP ORDERS HIS TOMB AT 
ST. PRAXED'S CHURCH. 

[Rome, 15 — .] 

Vanity, saith the preacher, vanity ! 

Draw round my bed : is Ansehn keeping back ? 

Nephews — sons mine — ah God, I know not! Well — 

She, men would have to be your mother once, 

Old Gandolf envied me, so fair she was ! 5 

What 's done is done, and she is dead beside, 

Dead long ago, and I am Bishop since, 

And as she died so must we die ourselves, 

And thence ye may perceive the world 's a dream. 

Life, how and what is it ? As here I lie »o 

In this state-chamber, dying by degrees, 

Hours and long hours in the dead night, I ask 

' Do I live, am I dead ?' Peace, peace seems all. 

St. Praxed's ever was the church for peace ; 

And so about this tomb of mine. I fought is 

With tooth and nail to save my niche, ye know : — 

Old Gandolf cozened me, despite my care; 

Shrewd was that snatch from out the corner south 

He graced his carrion with, God curse the same ! 

Yet still my niche is not so cramped but thence 2c 

One sees the pulpit on the epistle-side, 

And somewhat of the choir, those silent seats, 

And up into the aery dome where live 

The angels, and a sunbeam's sure to lurk : 

And I shall fill my slab of basalt there, 2; 



58 ROBERT BROWJVING. 

And 'neath my tabernacle take my rest, 

With those nine columns round me, two and two. 

The odd one at my feet where Anselm stands : 

Peach-blossom marble all, the rare, the ripe. 

As fresh-poured red wine of a mighty pulse. — 30 

Old Gandolf with his paltry onio-n-stone. 

Put me where I may look at him ! True peach. 

Rosy and flawless : how I earned the prize ! 

Draw close : that conflagration of my church — 

What then ? So much was saved if aught were missed ! 35 

My sons, ye would not be my death ? Go dig 

The white-grape vineyard, where the oil-press stood, 

Drop water gently till the surface sinks, 

And if ye find — Ah, God, I know not, I ! — 

Bedded in store of rotten fig-leaves soft, 40 

And corded up in a tight olive-frail, 

Some lump, ah God, of lapis lazuli. 

Big as a Jew's head cut off at the nape. 

Blue as a vein o'er the Madonna's breast — 

Sons, all have I bequeathed you, villas, all, 45 

That brave Frascati villa with its bath. 

So let the blue lump poise between my knees, 

Like God the Father's globe on both his hands 

Ye worship in the Jesu Church so gay. 

For Gandolf shall not choose but see and burst ! so 

Swift as a weaver's shuttle fleet our years ; 

Man goeth to the grave, and where is he ? 

Did I say basalt for my slab, sons? Black — 

'T was ever antique-black I meant ! How else 

Shall ye contrast my frieze to come beneath ? 55 

The bas-relief in bronze ye promised me. 

Those Pans and Nymphs ye wot of, and perchance 

Some tripod, thyrsus, with a vase or so. 

The Saviour at his sermon on the mount, 

St. Praxed in a glory, and one Pan 60 



THE BISHOP ORDERS HIS TOMB. 59 

Ready to twitch the Nymph's last garment off, 

And Moses with the tables — but I know 

Ye mark me not ! What do they whisper thee, 

Child of my bowels, Anselm ? Ah, ye hope 

To revel down my villas while I gasp, 65 

Bricked o'er with beggar's mouldy travertine 

Which Gandolf from his tomb-top chuckles at! 

Nay, boys, ye love me — all of jasper, then ! 

'T is jasper ye stand pledged to, lest I grieve 

My bath must needs be left behind, alas ! 70 

One block, pure green as a pistachio-nut, 

There 's plenty jasper somewhere in the world — 

And have I not St. Praxed's ear to pray 

Horses for ye, and brown Greek manuscripts, 

And mistresses with great smooth marbly limbs ? — 75 

That's if ye carve my epitaph aright, 

Choice Latin, picked phrase, Tully's every word. 

No gaudy ware like Gandolfs second line — 

TuUy, my masters? Ulpian serves his need ! 

And then how I shall lie through centuries, So 

And hear the blessed mutter of the mass. 

And see God made and eaten all day long. 

And feel the steady candle-flame, and taste 

Good strong thick stupefying incense-smoke ! 

For as I lie here, hours of the dead night, 85 

Dying in state and by such slow degrees, 

I fold my arms as if they clasped a crook. 

And stretch my feet forth straight as stone can point. 

And let the bedclothes for a mortcloth drop 

Into great laps and folds of sculptor's work ; 90 

And as yon tapers dwindle, and strange thoughts 

Grow, with a certain humming in my ears, 

About the life I lived before this life. 

And this life too, popes, cardinals, and priests, 

St. Praxed at his sermon on the mount, 95 



6o ROBERT BROWNING. 

Your tall pale mother with her talking eyes, 

And new-found agate urns as fresh as day, 

And marble's language, Latin pure, discreet, — 

Aha, ELUCESCEBAT quoth our friend ? 

No Tully, said I, Ulpian at the best ! loo 

Evil and brief hath been my pilgrimage. 

All lapis, all, sons ! Else I give the Pope 

My villas : will ye ever eat my heart ? 

Ever your eyes were as a lizard's quick, 

They glitter like your mother's for my soul, 105 

Or ye would heighten my impoverished frieze. 

Piece out its starved design, and fill my vase 

With grapes, and add a vizor and a Term, 

And to the tripod ye would tie a lynx, 

That in his struggle throws the thyrsus down, no 

To comfort me on my entablature 

Whereon I am to lie till I must ask 

' Do I live, am I dead ?' There, leave me, there ! 

For ye have stabbed me with ingratitude 

To death — ye wish it — God, ye wish it ! Stone — 115 

Gritstone, a-crumble ! Clammy squares which sweat 

As if the corpse they keep were oozing through — 

And no more lapis to delight the world ! 

Well, go ! I bless ye. Fewer tapers there. 

But in a row : and, going, turn your backs — 120 

Ay, like departing altar-ministrants, 

And leave me in my church, the church for peace. 

That I may watch at leisure if he leers — 

Old Gandolf, at me, from his onion-stone, 

As still he envied me, so fair she was ! 125 



RABBI BEN EZRA. 

I. 

Grow old along with me ! 

The best is yet to be, 

The last of life, for which the first was made : 

Our times are in Ills hand 

Who saith * A whole I planned, 5 

Youth shows but half; trust God : see all, nor be afraid!' 

TI. 

Not that, amassing flowers, 
Youth sighed ' Which rose make ours. 
Which lily leave and then as best recall!' 
Not that, admiring stars, 10 

It yearned ' Nor Jove, nor Mars ; 

Mine be some figured flame which blends, transcends them 
all !' 

III. 
Not for such hopes and fears 
Annulling youth's brief years. 

Do I remonstrate; folly wide the mark! 15 

Rather I prize the doubt 
Low kinds exist without. 
Finished and finite clods, untroubled by a spark. 

IV. 

Poor vaunt of life indeed. 

Were man but formed to feed 20 



62 ROBERT BROWNING. 

On joy, to solely seek and find and feast : 
Such feasting ended, then 
As sure an end to men ; 

Irks care the crop-full bird? Frets doubt the maw-crammed 
beast ? 

V. 

Rejoice we are allied 25 

To That which doth provide 

And not partake, effect and not receive ! 

A spark disturbs our clod ; 

Nearer we hold of God 

Who gives, than of His tribes that take, I must believe. 30 

VI. 

Then, welcome each rebuff 

That turn's earth's smoothness rough, 

Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go! 

Be our joys three-parts pain ! 

Strive, and hold cheap the strain ; 35 

Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe! 

VII. 

For thence — a paradox 

Which comforts while it mocks — 

Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail : 

What I aspired to be, 40 

And was not, comforts me ; 

A brute I might have been, but would not sink i' the scale. 

VIII. 

What is he but a brute 

Whose flesh hath soul to suit, 

Whose spirit works lest arms and legs want play? 45 

To man, propose this test — 

Thy body at its best. 

How far can that project thy soul on its lone way? 



KABBI BEN EZRA. 



63 



IX. 

Yet gifts should prove their use : 

I own the Past profuse so 

Of power each side, perfection every turn : 
Eyes, ears took in their dole, 
Brain treasured up the whole; 

Should not the heart beat once 'How good to live and 
learn ?' 

X. 

Not once beat ' Praise be Thine ! 55 

I see the whole design, 

I, who saw power, see now love perfect too : 

Perfect I call Thy plan : 

Thanks that I was a man ! 

Maker, remake, complete, — I trust what Thou shalt do !' eo 

XI. 

For pleasant is this flesh; 

Our soul, in its rose-mesh 

Pulled ever to the earth, still yearns for rest: 

Would we some prize might hold 

To match those manifold 65 

Possessions of the brute, — gain most, as we did best ! 

XII. 

Let us not always say 
' Spite of this flesh to-day 

I strove, made head, gained -ground upon the whole !' 
As the bird wings and sings, 70 

Let us cry ' All good things 

Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps 
soul !' 



64 ROBERT BROWNING, 



XIII. 
Therefore I summon age 
To grant youth's heritage, 

Life's struggle having so far reached its term : 75 

Thence shall I pass, approved 
A man, for aye removed 
From the developed brute ; a God though in the germ. 



XIV. 

And I shall thereupon 

Take rest, ere I be gone 80 

Once more on my adventure brave and new ; 

Fearless and unperplexed, 

When I wage battle next. 

What weapons to select, what armour to indue. 

XV. 

Youth ended, I shall try 85 

My gain or loss thereby ; 

Leave the fire ashes, what survives is gold : 

And I shall weigh the same, 

Give life its praise or blame : 

Young, all lay in dispute ; I shall know, being old. 90 

XVI. 

For note, when evening shuts, 

A certain moment cuts 

The deed off, calls the glory from the gray : 

A whisper from the vilest 

Shoots — ' Add this to the rest, ^ 95 

Take it and try its worth : here dies another day.' 

XVII. 

So, still within this life. 
Though lifted o'er its strife. 



65 



RABBI BEN EZRA. 

Let me discern, compare, pronounce at last, 

' This rage was right i' the main, loo 

That acquiescence vain : 

The Future I may face now I have proved the Past.' 

XVIII. 

For more is not reserved 

To man, with soul just nerved 

To act to-morrow what he learns to-day; 105 

Here, work enough to watch 

The Master work, and catch 

Hints of the proper craft, tricks of the tool's true play. 

XIX. 

As it was better, youth 

Should strive, through acts uncouth, no 

Toward making, than repose on aught found made ; 

So, better, age, exempt 

From strife, should know, than tempt 

Further. Thou waitedst age ; wait death nor be afraid ! 

XX. 

Enough now, if the Right 115 

And Good and Infinite 

Be named here, as thou call'st thy hand thine own, 

With knowledge absolute, 

Subject to no dispute 

From fools that crowded youth, nor let thee feel alone. 120 

XXI. 

Be there, for once and all, 
Severed great minds from small, 
Announced to each his station in the Past! 
Was I the world arraigned. 

Were they my soul disdained, 125 

Right.? Let age speak the truth and give us peace at last! 

5 



66 ROBERT BROWNING. 

XXII. 

Now, who shall arbitrate ? 

Ten men love what I hate, 

Shun what I follow, slight what I receive ; 

Ten, who in ears and eyes 130 

Match me : we all surmise, 

They this thing, and I that; whom shall my soul believe ? 

XXIII. 

Not on the vulgar mass 

Called ' work ' must sentence pass, 

Things done, that took the eye and had the price; 135 

O'er which, from level stand, 

The low world laid its hand. 

Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice : 

XXIV. 

But all, the world's coarse thumb 

And finger failed to plumb, 140 

So passed in making up the main account ; 

All instincts immature, 

All purposes unsure, 

That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's amount ; 

XXV. 

Thoughts hardly to be packed 145 

Into a narrow act, 

Fancies that broke through language and escaped ; 

All I could never be, 

All men ignored in me, 

This I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped, 150 

XXVI. 

Ay, note that Potter's wheel, 
That metaphor ! and feel 



RABBI BEN EZRA. 



67 



Why time spins fast, why passive lies our clay, — 
Thou, to whom fools propound, 

When the wine makes its round, 155 

* Since life fleets, all is change ; the Past gone, seize to- 
day !' 

XXVII. 

Fool ! All that is at all 

Lasts ever, past recall ; 

Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure: 

What entered into thee, 160 

That was, is, and shall be: 

Time's wheel runs back or stops ; Potter and clay endure. 

XXVIII. 

He fixed thee mid this dance 

(Jt plastic circumstance, 

This Present, thou, forsooth, wouldst fain arrest 165 

Machinery just meant 

To give thy soul its bent. 

Try thee and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed. 

XXIX. 

What though the earlier grooves 

Which ran the laughing loves 170 

Around thy base, no longer pause and press? 

What though, about thy rim, 

Skull-things in order grim 

Grow out, in graver mood, obey the sterner stress.'' 

XXX. 

Look thou not down but up! 173 

To uses of a cup, 

The festal board, lamp's flash and trumpet's peal, 
The new wine's foaming flow. 
The Master's lips a-glow ! 

Thou, heaven's consummate cup, what needst thou with 
earth's wheel? 180 



68 



ROBERT BROWNING. 



XXXI. 

But I need, now as then, 

Thee, God, who mouldest men; 

And since, not even while the whirl was worst, 

Did I, — to the wheel of life, 

With shapes and colours rife, 

Bound dizzily, — mistake my end, to slake Thy thirst \ 



XXXII. 

So take and use Thy work, 

Amend what flaws may lurk. 

What strain o' the stuff, what warpings past the aim I 

My times be in Thy hand! 

Perfect the cup as planned ! 

Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same! 



190 




BEN KARSHOOK'S WISDOM. 

I. 

'Would a man 'scape the rod?' 
Rabbi Ben Karshook saith, 
'See that he turn to God 
The day before his death.' 

*Ay, could a man inquire 5 

When it shall come!' I say: 
The Rabbi's eye shoots fire— 
'Then let him turn to-day!' 

IT. 

Quoth a young Sadducee : 

* Reader of many rolls, lo 
Is it so certain we 

Have, as they tell us, souls?' 

'Son, there is no reply!' 
The Rabbi bit his beard : 

* Certain, a soul have / — ' »5 
We may have none,' he sneer'd. 



Thus Karshook, the Hiram's-Hammer, 
The Right-hand Temple-column, 
Taught babes in grace their grammar, 
And struck the simple, solemn. 



'CHILDE ROLAND TO THE DARK 

TOWER came; 

(See Edgar's song in ' Lear.') 

I. 

My first thought was, he lied in every word. 
That hoary cripple, with malicious eye 
Askance to watch the working of his lie 
On mine, and mouth scarce able to afford 
S'UDpression of the glee, that pursed and scored 5 

Its edge, at one more victim gained thereby. 

II. 
What else should he be set for, with his staff? 
What, save to waylay with his lies, ensnare 
All travellers who might find him posted there, 
And ask the road? I guessed what skull-like laugh 10 
Would break, what crutch 'gin write my epitaph 
For pastime in the dusty thoroughfare, 

III. 

If at his counsel I should turn aside 

Into that ominous tract which, all agree, 

Hides the Dark Tower. Yet acquiescingly 15 

I did turn as he pointed ; neither pride 

Nor hope rekindling at the end descried, 

So much as gladness that some end might be. 



^ CHILD E ROLAND TO THE DARK TOWER CAME: y i 

IV. 

For, what with my whole world-wide wandering, 

What with my search drawn out thro' years, my hope 
Dwindled into a ghost not fit to cope 21 

With that obstreperous joy success would bring, — 

I hardly tried now to rebuke the spring 
My heart made, finding failure in its scope. 

V. 

As when a sick man very near to death 25 

Seems dead indeed, and feels begin and end 
The tears and takes the farewell of each friend, 
And hears one bid the other go, draw breath 
Freelier outside ('since all is o'er,' he saith, 

'And the blow fallen no grieving can amend'); 30 

VI. 

While some discuss if near the other graves 
Be room enough for this, and when a day 
Suits best for carrying the corpse away, 
With care about the banners, scarves, and staves: • 
And still the man hears all, and only craves 3S 

He may not shame such tender love and stay. 

VII. 

Thus, I had so long suffered in this quest, 
Heard failure prophesied so oft, been writ 
So many times among ' The Band '—to wit, 
The knights who to the Dark Tower's search addressed 
Their steps— that just to fail as they, seemed best, 41 

And all the doubt was now — should I be fit.? 

viii. 
So, quiet as despair, I turned from him, 
That hateful cripple, out of his highway 
Into tne path he pointed. All the day 45 



^2 ROBERT BROIVNIA^G. 

Had been a dreary one at best, and dim 
Was settling to its close, yet shot one grim 
Red leer to see the plain catch its estray. 

IX. 

For mark ! no sooner was I fairly found 

Pledged to the plain, after a pace or two, so 

Than, pausing to throw backward a last view 

O'er the safe road, 't was gone ; gray plain all round : 

Nothing but plain to the horizon's bound. 
I might go on ; nought else remained to do. 

X. 

So on I went. I think I never saw 55 

Such starved ignoble nature ; nothing throve : 
For flowers — as well expect a cedar grove ! 
But cockle, spurge, according to their law 
Might propagate their kind, with none to awe, 

You 'd think ; a burr had been a treasure trove. 60 

XI. 

No ! penury, inertness, and grimace, 

In some strange sort, were the land's portion. ' See 
Or shut your eyes,' said Nature peevishly, 
* It nothing skills; I cannot help my case: 
'T is the Last Judgment's fire must cure this place, 65 
Calcine its clods and set my prisoners free.' 

XII. 

If there pushed any ragged thistle-stalk 

Above its mates, the head was chopped ; the bents 
Were jealous else. What made those holes and rents 
In the dock's harsh swarth leaves, bruised as to baulk 70 
All hope of greenness? 't is a brute must walk 
Pashing their life out, with a brute's intents. 



CHILD E ROLAND TO THE DARK TOWER CAME: 73 



XIII. 

As for the grass, it grew as scant as hair 

In leprosy; thin dry blades pricked the mud 

Which underneath looked kneaded up with blood. 75 

One stiff blind horse, his every bone a-stare. 

Stood stupefied, however he came there ; 

Thrust out past service from the devil's stud ! 

XTV. 

Alive? he might be dead for aught I know, 

With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain, 80 

And shut eyes underneath the rusty mane ; 

Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe ; 

I never saw a brute I hated so ; 

He must be wicked to deserve such pain. 

XV. 

I shut my eyes and turned them on my heart. 85 

As a man calls for wine before he fights, 
I asked one draught of earlier, happier sights, 

Ere fitly I could hope to play my part. 

Think first, fight afterwards — the soldier's art ; 

One taste of the old time sets all to rights. 9° 

XVI. 

Not it ! I fancied Cuthbert's reddening face 

Beneath its garniture of curly gold, 

Dear fellow, till I almost felt him fold 
An arm in mine to fix me to the place. 
That way he used. Alas, one night's disgrace ! 95 

Out went my heart's new fire and left it cold. 

XVII. 

Giles then, the soul of honour — there he stands 
Frank as ten years ago when knighted first. 
What honest man should dare (he said) he durst. 



^4 ROBERT BROWNING. 

Good — but the scene shifts — faugh! what hangman hands 
Pin to his breast a parchment? His own bands loi 

Read it. Poor traitor, spit upon and curst ! 

XVIII. 

Better this present than a past like that ; 

Back therefore to my darkening path again ! 

No sound, no sight as far as eye could strain. 105 

Will the night send a howlet or a bat? 
I asked ; when something on the dismal flat 

Came to arrest my thoughts and change their train. 

XIX. 

A sudden little river crossed my path 

As unexpected as a serpent comes. "o 

No sluggish tide congenial to the glooms ; 
This, as it frothed by, might have been a bath 
For the fiend's glowing hoof — to see the wrath 

Of its black eddy bespate with flakes and spumes. 

XX. 

So petty yet so spiteful ! All along, 115 

Low scrubby alders kneeled down over it ; 
Drenched willows flung them headlong in a fit 
Of mute despair, a suicidal throng : 
The river which had done them all the wrong, 

Whate'er that was, rolled by, deterred no whit. 120 

XXI. 

Which, while I forded, — good saints, how I feared 
To set my foot upon a dead man's cheek, 
Each step, or feel the spear I thrust to seek 
For hollows, tangled in his hair or beard! — 
It may have been a water-rat I speared, 125 

But, ugh ! it sounded like a baby's shriek. 



Cr^ILDE ROLAND TO THE DARK TOWER CAME: 75 



xxn. 
Glad was I when I reached the other bank. 

Now for a better country. Vain presage ! 

Who were the striigglers, what war did they wage 
Whose savage trample thus could pad the dank n^ 

Soil to a plash? Toads in a poisoned tank, 

Or wild cats in a red-hot iron cage — 

XXIII. 

The fight must so have seemed in that fell cirque. 

What penned them there, with all the plain to choose? 

No foot-print leading to that horrid mews, ns 

None out of it. Mad brewage set to work 
Their brains, no doubt, like galley-slaves the Turk 

Pits for his pastime. Christians against Jews. 

XXIV. 

And more than that — a furlong on — why, there! 

What bad use was that engine for, that wheel, i40 

Or brake, not wheel — that harrow fit to reel 

Men's bodies out like silk? with all the air 

Of Tophet's tool, on earth left unaware, 

Or brought to sharpen its rusty teeth of steel. 

XXV. 

Then came a bit of stubbed ground, once a wood, i4'; 
Next a marsh, it would seem, and now mere earth 
Desperate and done with (so a fool finds mirth, 

Makes a thing and then mars it, till his mood 

Changes and off he goes!) — within a rood 

Bog, clay, and rubble, sand and stark black dearth. 150 

XXVI. 

Now blotches rankling, coloured gay and grim, 
Now patches where some leanness of the soil *s 
Broke into moss or substances like boils; 



-6 ROBERT BROWNING. 

Then came some palsied oak, a cleft in him 
Like a distorted mouth that splits its rim 155 

Gaping at death, and dies while it recoils. 

XXVII. 

And just as far as ever from the end, 

Nought in the distance but the evening, nought 
To point my footstep further ! At the thought, 
A great black bird, Apollyon's bosom-friend, 160 

Sailed past, nor beat his wide wing dragon-penned 
That brushed my cap — perchance the guide I sought. 

XXVIII. 

For, looking up, aware I somehow grew. 
Spite of the dusk, the plain had given place 
All round to mountains — with such name to grace 165 

Mere ugly heights and heaps now stolen in view. 

How thus they had surprised me, — solve it, you ! 
How to get from them was no clearer case. 

XXIX. 

Yet half I seemed to recognize some trick 

Of mischief happened to me, God knows when — 170 
In a bad dream perhaps. Here ended, then. 
Progress this way. When, in the very nick 
Of giving up, one time more, came a click 
As when a trap shuts — you 're inside the den. 

XXX. 

Burningly it came on me all at once, 17s 

This was the place ! those two hills on the right. 
Crouched like two bulls locked horn in horn in fight, 

While, to the left, a tall scalped mountain — Dunce, 

Dotard, a-dozing at the very nonce, 

After a life spent training for the sight ! 180 



CHILD E ROLAND TO THE DARK TOWER CAME: 77 



XXXI. 

What in the midst lay but the Tower itself? 

The round squat turret, blind as the fool's heart, 
Built of brown stone, without a counterpart 
In the whole world. The tempest's mocking elf 
Points to the shipman thus the unseen shelf '85 

He strikes on, only when the timbers start. 

XXXII. 

Not see? because of night perhaps? — why, day 
Came back again for that ! before it left, 
The dying sunset kindled through a cleft ; 
The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay, ^90 

Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay, — 
' Now stab and end the creature — to the heft !' 

XXXIII. 

Not hear? when noise was everywhere! it tolled 
Increasing like a bell. Names in my ears 
Of all the lost adventurers my peers, — ^q.=^ 

How such a one was strong, and such was bold. 

And such was fortunate, yet each of old 

Lost, lost ! one moment knelled the woe of years. 

XXXIV. 

There they stood, ranged along the hill-sides, met 

To view the last of me, a living frame 200 

For one more picture ! in a sheet of fiarne 

I saw them and I knew them all. And yet 

Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set, 

And blew ' Childe Roland to the Dark l^ower came' 



THE BOY AND THE ANGEL. 

Morning, evening, noon, and night, 

' Praise God !' sang Theocrite. 

Then to his poor trade he turned, 

Whereby the daily meal was earned. 

Hard he laboured, long and well ; 

O'er his work the boy's curls fell : 

But ever, at each period, 

He stopped and sang, ' Praise God !' 

Then back again his curls he threw, 

And cheerful turned to work anew. 

Said Blaise, the listening monk, ' Well done ; 

I doubt not thou art heard, my .son ; 

As well as if thy voice to-day 

Were praising God the Pope's great way. 

This Easter Day, the Pope at Rome 

Praises God from Peter's dome.' 

Said Theocrite, 'Would God that I 

Might praise Him that great way, and die!' 

Night passed, day shone, 

And Theocrite was gone. 

With God a day endures alway, 
A thousand years are but a day, 
God said in heaven, ' Nor day nor night 
Now brings the voice of my delight.' 



THE BOY AND THE ANGEL. 79 

Then Gabriel, like a rainbow's birth, 25 

Spread his wings and sank to earth ; 

Entered, in flesh, the empty cell. 

Lived there, and played the craftsman well ; 

And morning, evening, noon, and night, 

Praised God in place of Theocrite. 30 

And from a boy to youth he grew ; 
The man put off the stripling's hue ; 

The man matured and fell away 

Into the season of decay ; 

And ever o'er the trade he bent, 35 

And ever lived on earth content. 

(He did God's will; to him, all one 

If on the earth or in the sun.) 

God said, ' A praise is in mine ear ; 

There is no doubt in it, no fear : 40 

So sing old worlds, and so 

New worlds that from my footstool go. 

Clearer loves sound other ways : 

I miss my little human praise.' 

Then forth sprang Gabriel's wings, off fell 4=; 

The flesh disguise, remained the cell. 

'T was Easter Day : he flew to Rome, 
And paused above Saint Peter's dome. 

In the tiring-room close by 

The great outer gallery, 5° 

With his holy vestments dight, 
Stood the new Pope, Theocrite : 

And all his past career 
Came back upon him clear, 



8o ROBERT BROWNING. 

Since when, a boy, he plied his trade, 55 

Till on his life the sickness weighed; 

And in his cell, when death drew near, 
An angel in a dream brought cheer: 

And, rising from the sickness drear, 

He grew a priest, and now stood here. 60 

To the East with praise he turned. 
And on his sight the angel burned. 

' I bore thee from thy craftsman's cell. 
And set thee here : I did not well. 

Vainly I left my angel-sphere, 65 

Vain was thy dream of many a year. 

Thy voice's praise seemed weak; it dioppen — 
Creation's chorus stopped! 

Go back and praise again 

The early way, while I remain. 70 

With that weak voice of our disdain, 
Take up creation's pausing strain. 

Back to the cell and poor employ; 
Resume the craftsman and the boy !' 

Theocrite grew old at home ; 75 

A new Pope dwelt in Peter's dome. 

One vanished as the other died : 
They sought God side by side. 




TWO CAMELS. 

From 'Ferishtah's Fancies.' 

Quoth one : ' Sir, solve a scruple ! No true sage 

I hear of, but instructs his scholar thus : 

" Wouldst thou be wise? Then mortify thyself! 

Baulk of its craving every bestial sense ! 

Say, ' If I relish melons— so do swine ! 

Horse, ass, and mule consume their provender 

Nor leave a pea-pod: fasting feeds the soul.'" 

Thus they admonish ; while thyself, I note, 

Eatest thy ration with an appetite, 

Nor fallest foul of whoso licks his lips 

And sighs "Well-saffroned was that barley-soup!'" 

Can wisdom coexist with— gorge-and-swill 

I say not — simply sensual preference 

For this or that fantastic meat and drink ? 

Moreover, wind blows sharper than its wont 

This morning, and thou hast already donned 

Thy sheepskin over-garment: sure the sage 

Is busied with conceits that soar above 

A petty change of season and it^ chance 

Of causing ordinary flesh to sneeze? 

I always thought. Sir ' — 

* Son,' Ferishtah said, 
* Truth ought to seem as never thought before. 
How if I give it birth in parable ? 
A neighbour owns two camels, beasts of price 
And promise, destined each to go, next week, 
6 



82 ROBERT BROWNING. 

Swiftly and surely with his merchandise 

From Nishapur to Sebzevah, no truce 

To tramp, but travel, spite of sands and drouth. 

In days so many, lest they miss the Fnir. 

Each falls to meditation o'er his crib 3c 

Piled high with provender before the start. 

Quoth this . " My soul is set on winning praise 

From goodman lord and master — hump to hoof, 

I dedicate me to his service. How ? 

Grass, purslane, lupines, and I know not what, 35 

Crammed in my manger? Ha, I see, I see ! 

No, master, spare thy money ! I shall trudge 

The distance and yet cost thee not a doit 

Beyond my supper on this mouldy bran." 

" Be magnified, O master, for the meal 40 

So opportunely liberal !" quoth that. 

"What use of strength in me but to surmount 

Sands and simooms, and bend beneath thy bales 

No knee until I reach the glad bazaar ? 

Thus I do justice to thy fare : no sprig 45 

Of toothsome chervil must I leave unchewed ! 

Too bitterly should I reproach myself 

Did I sink down in sight of Sebzevah, 

Remembering how the merest mouthful more 

Had heartened me to manage yet a mile!" 50 

And so it proved : the too-abstemious brute 

Midway broke down, his pack rejoiced the thieves, 

His carcass fed the vultures ; not so he 

The wisely thankful, who, good market-drudge. 

Let down his lading in the market-place, 55 

No damage to a single pack. AVhich beast, 

Think ye, had praise and patting and a brand 

Of good-and-fiiithful-servant fixed on flank t 

So with thy squeamish scruple — what imports 

Fasting or feasting? Do thy day's work, dare 60 



TPVO CAMELS. 8^ 

Refuse no help thereto, since help refused 
Is hindrance sought and found. Win but the race — 
Who shall object " He tossed three wine-cups off, 
And, just at starting, Lilith kissed his lips?" 

' More soberly, — consider this, my Son ! 65 

Put case I never have myself enjoyed. 

Known by experience what enjoyment means, 

How shall I — share enjoyment? — no, indeed! — 

Supply it to my fellows, — ignorant, 

As so I should be of the thing they crave, 70 

How it affects them, works for good or ill. 

Style my enjoyment self-indulgence — sin — 

Why should I labour to infect my kind 

With sin's occasion, bid them too enjoy, 

Who else might neither catch nor give again 75 

Joy's plague, but live in righteous misery? 

Just as I cannot, till myself convinced. 

Impart conviction, so, to deal forth joy 

Adroitly, needs must I know joy myself. 

Renounce joy for my fellows' sake ? That 's joy 80 

Beyond joy; but renounced for mine, not theirs? 

Why, the physician called to help the sick 

Cries "Let me, first of all, discard my health!" 

No, Son : the richness hearted in such joy 

Is in the knowing what are gifts we give, 85 

Not in a vain endeavour not to know ! 

Therefore, desire joy and thank God for it! 

The Adversary said — a Jew reports — 

: n1r^b^< ni'^x x-p C3nn 

In Persian phrase, "Does Job fear God for nought?" 9° 

Job's creatureship is not abjured, thou fool! 

He nowise isolates himself and plays 

The independent equal, owns no more 

Than himself gave himself, so why thank God? 



84 



ROBERT BROWNING. 

A proper speech were this c^nbxia 

" Equals we are, Job, labour for thyself, 

Nor bid me help thee ; bear, as best flesh may, 

Pains I inflict not nor avail to cure ; 

Beg of me nothing thou mayst win thyself 

By work, or waive with magnanimity, 

Since we are peers acknowledged — scarcely peers 

Had I implanted any want of thine 

Only my power could meet and gratify." 

No : rather hear, at man's indifference, 

" Wherefore did I contrive for thee that ear 

Hungry for music, and direct thine eye 

To where I hold a seven-stringed instrument, 

Unless I meant thee to beseech me play?"' 



55 




YOUTH AND ART. 
I. 

It once might have been, once only: 

We lodged in a street together, 
You, a sparrow on the housetop lonely, 

I, a lone she-bird of his feather. 

II. 
Your trade was with sticks and clay, s 

You thumbed, thrust, patted, and polished, 
Then laughed, 'They will see, some day, 

Smith made, and Gibson demolished.' 

III. 

My business was song, song, song ; 

I chirped, cheeped, trilled, and twittered, lo 

* Kate Brown 's on the boards ere long, 

And Grisi's existence imbittered 1' 

IV. 

I earned no more by a warble 

Than you by a sketch in plaster; 
You wanted a piece of marble, 'S 

I needed a music-master. 

V. 

We studied hard in our styles. 

Chipped each at a crust like Hindoos, 

For air, looked out on the tiles. 

For fun, watched each other's windows. 20 



86 ROBERT BROWNING. 

VI. 
You lounged, like a boy of the South, 

Cap and blouse — nay, a bit of beard too ; 
Or you got it, rubbing your mouth 

With fingers the clay adhered to. 

VII. 

And I— soon managed to find zs 

Weak points in the flower- fence facing, 

Was forced to put up a blind 
And be safe in my corset-lacing. 

VIII. 

No harm ! It was not my fault 

If you never turned your eye's tail up 30 

As I shook upon E in alt.^ 

Or ran the chromatic scale up ; 

IX. 

For spring bade the sparrows pair, 
And the boys and girls gave guesses, 

And stalls in our street looked rare 3S 

With bulrush and watercresses. 

X. 

Why did not you pinch a flower 

In a pellet of clay and fling it.-* 
Why did not I put a power 

Of thanks in a look, or sing it? 40 

XI. 

I did look, sharp as a lynx 

(And yet the memory rankles) 
When models arrived, some minx 

Tripped up stairs, she and her ankles. 



YOUTH AND ART. 37 

XII. 

But I think I gave you as good ! 45 

' That foreign fellow — who can know 

How she pays, in a playful mood, 
For his tuning her that piano?' 

XIII. 

Could you say so, and never say 

' Suppose we join hands and fortunes, 50 

And I fetch her from over the way, 

Her, piano, and long tunes and short tunes.?' 

XIV. 

No, no ; you would not be rash. 

Nor I rasher and something over: 
You 've to settle yet Gibson's hash, 55 

And Grisi yet lives in clover. 

XV. 

But you meet the Prince at the Board, 

I 'm queen myself at bals-pares, 
I Ve married a rich old lord, 

And you 're dubbed knight and an R.A. 60 

xvi. 
Each life 's unfulfilled, you see ; 

It hangs still, patchy and scrappy : 
We have not sighed deep, laughed free. 

Starved, feasted, despaired,— been happy. 

xvii. 
And nobody calls you a dunce, 65 

And people suppose me clever; 
This could but have happened once, 

And we missed it, lost it forever. 



SONG. 

From *A Blot in the 'Scutcheon.' 

There 's a woman like a dewdrop, she 's so purer than the 
purest ; 

And her noble heart 's the noblest, yes, and her sure fiiith 's 
the surest ; 

And her eyes are dark and humid, like the depth on depth 
of lustre 

Hid i' the harebell, while her tresses, sunnier than the wild- 
grape cluster. 

Gush in golden-tinted plenty down her neck's rose-misted 
marble : 5 

Then her voice's music — call it the well's bubbling, the 
bird's warble ! 

And this woman says, ' My days were sunless and my nights 

were moonless, 
Parched the pleasant April herbage, and the lark's heart's 

outbreak tuneless. 
If you loved me not !' And I who — (ah, for words of 

flame !) adore her ! 
Who am mad to lay my spirit prostrate palpably before 

her — 10 

I may enter at her portal soon, as now her lattice takes rae, 
And by noontide as by midnight make her mine, as hers 
she makes me ! 



MAY AND DEATH. 



I WISH that when you died last May, 
Charles, there had died along with you 

Three parts of spring's delightful things ; 
Ay, and, for ijie, the fourth part too. 

II. 
A foolish thought, and worse, perhaps !" 

There must be many a pair of friends 
Who, arm in arm, deserve the warm 

Moon-births and the long evening-ends. 

III. 
So, for their sake, be May still May ! 

Let their new time, as mine of old. 
Do all it did for me : I bid 

Sweet sights and sounds throng manifold. 

IV. 

Only, one little sight, one plant, 

Woods have in May, that starts up green 

Save a sole streak which, so to speak. 

Is spring's blood, spilt its leaves between, — 

V. 

That, they might spare; a certain wood 

Might miss the plant ; their loss were small: 

But 1 — whene'er the leaf grows there. 
Its drop comes from my heart, that 's all. 



MY STAR. 

All that I know 

Of a certain star 
Is. it can throw — 

Like the angled spar — 
Now a dart of red, i 

Now a dart of blue ; 
Till my friends have said 

They would fain see, too, 
My star that dartles the red and the blue 1 
Then it stops like a bird ; like a flower, hangs furled : "^ 

They must solace themselves with the Saturn above it. 
What matter to me if their star is a world ? 

Mine has opened its soul to me ; therefore I love it. 




ONE WORD MORE. 

To E. B. B. 



There they are, my fifty men and women 
Naming me the fifty poems finished i 
Take them, Love, the book and me together. 
Where the heart lies, let the brain lie also. 



Rafael made a century of sonnets. 

Made and wrote them in a certain volume 

Dinted with the silver-pointed pencil 

Else he only used to draw Madonnas. 

These, the world might view— but one, the volume. 

Who that one, you ask? Your heart instructs you. 

Did she live and love it all her lifetime? 

Did she drop, his lady of the sonnets. 

Die, and let it drop beside her pillow 

Where it lay in place of Rafael's glory, 

Rafael's cheek so duteous and so loving — 

Cheek, the world was wont to hail a painter's, 

Rafael's cheek, her love had turned a poet's? 

III. 
You and I would rather read that volume 
(Taken to his beating bosom by it), 



92 



ROBERT BROWNING. 

Lean and list the bosom -beats of Rafael, 20 

Would we not? than wonder at Madonnas — 

Her, San Sisto names, and her, Foligno, 

Her that visits Florence in a vision, 

Her that 's left with lilies in the Louvre — 

Seen by us and all the world in circle. 25 

IV. 

You and I will never read that volume. 

Guido Reni, like his own eye's apple 

Guarded long the treasure-book and loved it, 

Guido Reni dying, all Bologna 

Cried, and the world with it, ' Ours the treasure !' 3° 

Suddenly, as rare things will, it vanished. 

v. 

Dante once prepared to paint an angel : 

Whom to please ? You whisper ' Beatrice.* 

While he mused and traced it and retraced it 

(Peradventure with a pen corroded 35 

Still by drops of that hot ink he dipped for, 

When, his left hand i' the hair o' the wicked, 

Back he held the brow and pricked its stigma, 

Bit into the live man's flesh for parchment, 

Loosed him, laughed to see the writing rankle, 40 

Let the wretch go festering through Florence) — 

Dante, who loved well because he hated, 

Hated wickedness that hinders loving, 

Dante standing, studying his angel, — 

In there broke the folk of his Inferno. 4S 

Says he — 'Certain people of importance* 

(Such he gave his daily, dreadful line to) 

* Entered and would seize, forsooth, the poet.' 

Says the poet, 'Then I stopped my painting.' 



ONE WORD MORE. 



93 



VI. 

You and I would rather see that angel, 50 

Tainted by the tenderness of Dante, — 
Would we not? — than read a fresh Inferno. 

vir. 
You and I will never see that picture. 
While he mused on love and Beatrice, 
While he softened o'er his outlined angc 1, 55 

In they broke, those ' people of importance:' 
W^e and Bice bear the loss forever. 



VIII. 

What of Rafael's sonnets, Dante's picture? 

This : no artist lives and loves that longs not 

Once, and only once, and for one only 60 

(Ah, the prize !), to find his love a language 

Fit and fair and simple and sufficient — 

Using nature that 's an art to others, 

Not, this one time, art that 's turned his nature. 

Ay, of all the artists living, loving, 65 

None but would forego his proper dowry — 

Does he paint? he fain would write a poem — 

Does he write ? he fain would paint a picture, 

Put to proof art alien to the artist's, 

Once, and only once, and for one only, 70 

So to be the man and leave the artist. 

Gain the man's joy, miss the artist's sorrow. 

IX. 

Wherefore? Heaven's gift takes earth's abatement ! 
He who smites the rock and spreads the water. 



94 



ROBERT BROWNING. 

Bidding drink and live a crowd beneath him, 75 

Even he, the minute makes immortal. 

Proves, perchance, but mortal in the minute, 

Desecrates, belike, the deed in doing. 

While he smites, how can he but remember, 

So he smote before, in such a peril, 80 

When they stood and mocked, Shall smiting help us?' 

When they drank and sneered, 'A stroke is easy !' 

When they wiped their mouths and went their journey 

Throwing him for thanks, 'But drought was pleasant!' 

Thus old memories mar the actual triumph; 85 

Thus the doing savours of disrelish ; 

Thus achievement lacks a gracious somewhat ; 

O'er-importuned brows becloud the mandate, 

Carelessness or consciousness the gesture. 

For he bears an ancient wrong about him, 9° 

Sees and knows again those phalanxed faces. 

Hears, yet one time more, the 'customed prelude — 

' How shouldst thou, of all men, smite, and save us?' 

Guesses what is like to prove the sequel — 

'Egypt's flesh-pots— nay, the drought was better.' 95 



Oh, the crowd must have emphatic warrant ! 
Theirs the Sinai-forehead's cloven brilliance, 
Right-arm's rod-sweep, tongue's imperial fiat. 
Never dares the man put off the prophet. 

XI. 

Did he love one face from out the thousands 
(Were she Jethro's daughter, white and wifely, 
Were she but the Ethiopian bond-slave), 
He would envy yon dumb patient camel, 
Keeping a reserve of scanty water 
Meant to save his own life in the desert : 



ONE WORD MORE. 

Ready in the desert to deliver 

(Kneeling down to let his breast be opened) 

Hoard and life together for his mistress. 

XII. 

I shall never, in the years remaining, 

Paint you pictures, no, nor carve you statues, 

Make you music that should all-express me ; 

So it seems : I stand on my attainment. 

This of verse alone one life allows me ; 

Verse and nothing else have I to give you. 

Other heights in other lives, God willing — 

All the gifts from all the heights, your own, Love ! 

XIII. 

Yet a semblance of resource avails us — 

Shade so finely touched, love's sense must seize it. 

Take these lines, look lovingly and nearly, 

Lines I write the first time and the last time. 

He who works in fresco steals a hair-brush. 

Curbs the liberal hand, subservient proudly, 

Cramps his spirit, crowds its all in little. 

Makes a strange art of an art familiar, 

Pills his lady's missal-marge with flowerets. 

He who blows thro' bronze may breathe thro' silver. 

Fitly serenade a slumbrous princess. 

He who writes may write for once as I do. 

XIV. 

Love, you saw me gather men and women. 
Live or dead or fashioned by my fancy, 
Enter each- and all, and use their service, 
Speak from every mouth, — the speech a poem. 
Hardly shall I tell my joys and sorrows, 
Hopes and fears, belief and disbelieving : 



95 



96 



R OB 1-:R T BR O WNING. 

I am mine and yours — the rest be all men's, 135 

Karshish, Cleon, Norbert, and the fifty. 

Let me speak this once in my true person, 

Not as Lippo, Roland, or Andrea, 

Though the fruit of speech be just this sentence — 

Pray you, look on these my men and women, 140 

Take and keep my fifty poems finished ; 

Where my heart lies, let my brain lie also ! 

Poor the speech ; be how I speak, for all things. 

XV. 

Not but that you know me ! Lo, ihe moon's self J 

Here in London, yonder late in Florence, ms 

Still we find her face, the thrice-transfigured. 

Curving on a sky imbrued with colour. 

Drifted over Fiesole by twilight, 

Came she, our new crescent of a hair's-breadth. 

Full she flared it, lamping Samminiato, 150 

Rounder 'twixt the cypresses and rounder, 

Perfect till the nightingales applauded. 

Now, a piece of her old self, impoverished. 

Hard to greet, she traverses the house-roofs. 

Hurries with unhandsome thrift of silver, 155 

Goes dispiritedly, glad to finish. 

XVI. 

What, there's nothing in the moon noteworthy? 

Nay : for if that moon could love a mortal, 

Use, to charm him (so to fit a fancy), 

All her magic ('t is the old sweet mythos), -60 

She would turn a new side to her mortal. 

Side unseen of herdsman, huntsman, steersman — 

Blank to Zoroaster on his terrace. 

Blind to Galileo on his turret. 

Dumb to Homer, dumb to Keats — him, even ! 165 



ONE WORD MORE. 



97 



Think, the wonder of the moonstruck mortal — 

When she turns round, comes again in heaven, 

Opens out anew for worse or better? 

Proves she like some portent of an iceberg 

Swimming full upon the ship it founders, 170 

Hungry with huge teeth of splintered crystals? 

Proves she as the paved-work of a sapphire 

Seen by Moses when he climbed the mountain ? 

Moses, Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu 

Climbed and saw the very God, the Highest, ^75 

Stand upon the paved-work of a sapphire. 

Like the bodied heaven in his clearness 

Shone the stone, the sapphire of that paved-work, 

When they ate and drank and saw God also ! 

XVII. 

What were seen ? None knows, none ever shall know. 
Only this is sure — the sight were other, 181 

Not the moon's same side, born late in Florence, 
Dying now impoverished here in London. 
God be thanked, the meanest of his creatures 
Boasts two soul-sides, one to face the world with, i8£ 
One to show a woman when he loves her. 

XVIII. 

This I say of me, but think of you. Love I 
This to you — yourself my moon of poets ! 
Ah, but that 's the world's side — there 's the wonder — 
Thus they see you, praise you, think they know you ! 19° 
There, in turn, I stand with them and praise you ! 
Out of my own self, I dare to phrase it. 
But the best is when I glide from out them. 
Cross a step or two of dubious twilight. 
Come out on the other side, the novel 195 

Silent, silver lights and darks undreamed of, 
Where I hush and bless myself with silence. 
7 



98 



ROBERT BROWNING. 



XIX. 



Oh, their Rafael of the dear Madonnas, 
Oh, their Dante of the dread Inferno, 
Wrote one song — and in my brain I sing it, 
Drew one angel — borne, see, on my bosom ! 




PROSPICE. 

Fear death?— to feel the fog in my throat, 

The mist in my face, 
When the snows begin, and the blasts denote 

I am nearing the place. 
The power of the night, the press of the storm, s 

The post of the foe, 
Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form ? 

Yet the strong man must go ; 
For the journey is done and the summit attained, 

And the barriers fall, lo 

Though a battle 's to fight ere the guerdon be gained, 

The reward of it all. 
I was ever a fighter, so — one fight more. 

The best and the last ! 
I would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forbore, 15 

And bade me creep past. 
No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers. 

The heroes of old, 
Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears 

Of pain, darkness, and cold. 20 

For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave, 

The black minute 's at end, 
And the elements' rage, the fiend-voices that rave, 

Shall dwindle, shall blend, 
Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain, 25 

Then a light, then thy breast, 
O thou soul of my soul ! I shall clasp thee again, 

And with God be the rest ! 



INVOCATION. 

From the 'Ring and the Book.' 

O lyric Love, half angel and half bird, 

And all a wonder and a wild desire — 

Boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun, 

Took sanctuary within the holier blue, 

And sang a kindred soul out to his face — ■ s 

Yet human at the red-ripe of the heart — 

When the first summons from the darkling earth 

Reached thee amid thy chambers, blanched their blue. 

And bared them of the glory — to drop down, 

To toil for man, to suffer or to die — lo 

This is the same voice : can thy soul know change ? 

Hail then, and hearken from the realms of help ! 

Never may I commence my song, my due 

To God who best taught song by gift of thee, 

Except with bent head and beseeching hand — 15 

That still, despite the distance and the dark. 

What was, again may be ; some interchange 

Of grace, some splendour once thy very thought, 

Some benediction anciently thy smile ; — 

Never conclude, but raising hand and head 20 

Thither where eyes, that cannot reach, yet yearn 

For all hope, all sustainment, all reward, 

Their utmost up and on — so blessing back 

In those thy realms of help, that heaven thy home, 

Some whiteness, which, I judge, thy face makes proud, 25 

Some wanness where, I think, thy foot may fall. 



A WALL. 

I. 

O THE old wall here ! How I could pass 

Life in a long midsummer day, 
My feet confined to a plot of grass, 

My eyes from a wall not once away! 

II. 

And lush and lithe do the creepers clothe 5 

Yon wall I watch, with a wealth of green : 

Its bald red bricks draped, nothing loath, 
In lappets of tangle they laugh between. 

III. 

Now, what is it makes pulsate the robe ? 

Why tremble the sprays ? What life o'erbrims 10 
The body — the house no eye can probe — 

Divined as, beneath a robe, the limbs ? 

IV. 

And there again ! But my heart may guess 
Who tripped behind ; and she sang perhaps ; 

So the old wall throbbed, and its life's excess is 

Died out and away in the leafy wraps ! 

V. 

Wall upon wall are between us ; life 

And song should away from heart to heart! 

I — prison-bird, with a ruddy strife 

At breast, and a lip whence storm-notes start — 20 



I02 



ROBERT BROWNING. 



VI. 



Hold on, hope hard in the subtle thing 

That 's spirit : though cloistered fast, soar free ; 

Account as wood, brick, stone, this ring 

Of the rueful neighbours, and — forth to thee ! 




PRELUDE TO 'DRAMATIC IDYLS/ 

(Second Series.) 

' You are sick, that 's sure ' — they say -• 
' Sick of what?' — they disagree. 
' 'T is the brain ' — thinks Dr. A.^, 
' 'T is the heart '—holds Dr. B., 
niie Hver— my hfe I'd lay!' 



The lungs!' 'The lights!' 



Ah me ! 



So ignorant of man's whole 
Of bodily organs plain to see — 
So sage and certain, frank and free, 
About what 's under lock and key- 
Man's soul! 



PIPPA PASSES. 

A Drama. 

New- Year's Day at Asolo in the Trevisan. — A large, mean, airy 
chamber. A girl, Yv?YA,from the silk-mills, springing out of bed. 

Day! 

Faster and more fast, 

O'er night's brim, day boils at last ; 

Boils, pure gold, o'er the cloud-cup's brim 

Where spurting and suppressed it lay: 5 

For not a froth-flake touched the rim 

Of yonder gap in the solid gray 

Of the eastern cloud, an hour away ; 

But forth one wavelet, then another, curled, 

Till the whole sunrise, not to be suppressed, 10 

Rose, reddened, and its seething breast 

Flickered in bounds, grew gold, then overflowed the world. 

Oh, Day, if I squander a wavelet of thee, 

A mite of my twelve hours' treasure. 

The least of thy gazes or glances 15 

(Be they grants thou art bound to, or gifts above measure), 

One of thy choices, or one of thy chances 

(Be they tasks God imposed thee, or freaks at thy pleasure) — 

My Day, if I squander such labour or leisure, 

Then shame fall on Asolo, mischief on me ! 20 

Thy long blue solemn hours serenely flowing. 
Whence earth, we feel, gets steady help and good — 



PROLOGUE. 105 

Thy fitful sunshine-minutes, coming, going. 

In which earth turns from work in gamesome mood — 

All shall be mine ! But thou must treat me not 25 

As the prosperous are treated, those who live 

At hand here, and enjoy the higher lot, 

In readiness to take what thou wilt give, 

And free to let alone what thou refusest; 

For, Day, my holiday, if thou ill-usest 30 

Me, who am only Pippa — old-year's sorrow. 

Cast off last night, will come again to-morrow : 

Whereas, if thou prove gentle, I shall borrow 

Sufficient strength of thee for new-year's sorrow. 

All other men and women that this earth 3S 

Belongs to, who all days alike possess. 

Make general plenty cure particular dearth, 

Get more joy one way, if another less : 

Thou art my single day God lends to leaven 

What were all earth else with a feel of heaven ; 40 

Sole light that helps me through the year, thy sun's! 

Try, now ! Take Asolo's Four Happiest Ones — 

And let thy morning rain on that superb 

Great haughty Ottima, can rain disturb 

Her Sebald's homage? All the while thy rain 4S 

Beats fiercest on her shrub-house window-pane. 

He will but press the closer, breathe more warm 

Against her cheek ; how should she mind the storm ? 

And, morning past, if midday shed a gloom 

O'er Jules and Phene, what care bride and groom 50 

Save for their dear selves? 'T is their marriage-day; 

And while they leave church, and go home their way 

Hand clasping hand, within each breast would be 

Sunbeams and pleasant weather spite of thee. 

Then, for another trial, obscure thy eve 55 

With mist, will Luigi and his mother grieve — ■ 

The lady and her child, unmatched, forsooth, 



io6 PIPPA PASSES. 

She in her age, as Luigi in his youth, 
For true content? The cheerful town, warm, close, 
And safe, the sooner that thou art morose, 60 

Receives them ! And yet once again, outbreak 
In storm at night on Monsignor they mal<e 
Such stir about — whom they expect from Rome 
'J'o visit Asolo, his brothers' home, 

And say here masses proper to release 65 

A soul from pain — what storm dares hurt his peace? 
Calm would he pray, with his own thoughts to ward 
Thy thunder off, nor want the angels' guard. 
But Pippa — just one such mischance would spoil 
Her day that lightens the next twelvemonth's loil 70 

At wearisome silk-winding, coil on coil! 
And here I let time slip for nought! 
Aha, you foolhardy sunbeam, caught 
With a single splash from my ewer! 

You that would mock the best pursuer, 75 

Was my basin overdeep? 
One splash of water ruins you asleep, 
And up, up, fleet your brilliant bits 
AVheeling and counterwheeling, 

Reeling, broken beyond healing — 80 

Now grow together on the ceiling! 
That will task your wits. 

Whoever it was quenched fire first, hoped to see 
Morsel after morsel flee 

As merrily, as giddily — 85 

Meantime, what lights my sunbeam on? 
Where settles by degrees the radiant cripple ? 
Oh, is it surely blown, my martagon ? 
New-blown and ruddy as Saint Agnes' nipple, 
Plump as the flesh-bunch on some Turk bird's poll ! qo 

Be sure if corals, branching 'neath the ripple 
Of ocean, bud there, fairies watch unroll 



PROLOGUE. 



107 



Such turban-flowers; I say, such lamps disperse 

Thick red flame through that dusk green universe! 

I am queen of thee, floweret • 95 

And each fleshy blossom 

Preserve I not — safer 

Than leaves that embower it, 

Or shells that embosom — 

P>om weevil and chafer ? 100 

Laugh through my pane, then; solicit the bee; 

Gibe him, be sure; and, in midst of thy glee, 

Love thy queen, worship me ! 

Worship whom else ? For am I not, this day, 

Whate'er I please ? What shall I please to-day? 105 

My morning, noon, eve, night — how spend my day? 

To-morrow I must be Pippa who winds silk. 

The whole year round, to earn just bread and milk : 

But, this one day, I have leave to go, 

And play out my fancy's fullest games; no 

I may fancy all day — and it shall be so — 

That I taste of the pleasures, am called by the names 

Of the Happiest Four in our Asolo ! 

See ! Up the hill-side yonder, through the morning. 
Some one shall love me, as the world calls love: ns 

. I am no less than Ottima, take warning! 
The gardens, and the great stone house above. 
And other house for shrubs, all glass in front, 
Are mine; where Sebald steals, as he is wont, 
To court me, while old Luca yet reposes; 120 

And therefore, till the shrub-house door uncloses, 
I — what now ? — give abundant cause for prate 
About me — Ottima, I mean — of late. 
Too bold, too confident she '11 still face down 
Tiie spitefullest of talkers in our town — 125 

How we talk in the little town below ! 



io8 PIPFA PASSES. 

But love, love, love — there 's better love, I know ! 
This foolish love was only Day's first offer; 
I choose my next love to defy the scoffer : 
For do not our Bride and Bridegroom sally 130 

Out of Possagno church at noon ? 
Their house looks over Orcana valley — 
Why should I not be the bride as soon 
As Ottima ? For I saw, beside, 

Arrive last night that little bride — 135 

Saw, if you call it seeing her, one flash 
Of the pale, snow-pure cheek and black bright tresses. 
Blacker than all except the black eyelash; 
I wonder she contrives those lids no dresses ! 
So strict was she, the veil mo 

Should cover close her pale 

Pure cheeks — a bride to look at and scarce touch, 
Scarce touch, remember, Jules ! — for are not such 
Used to be tended, flower-like, every feature. 
As if one's breath would fray the lily of a creature ? 145 

A soft and easy life these ladies lead ! 
Whiteness in us were wonderful indeed. 
Oh, save that brow its virgin dimness, 
Keep that foot its lady primness. 

Let those ankles never swerve 150 

From their exquisite reserve. 
Yet have to trip along the streets like me. 
All but naked to the knee ! 
How will she ever grant her Jules a bliss 
So startling as her real first infant kiss? 155 

Oh, no — not envy, this ! 
Not envy, sure ! — for if you gave me 
Leave to take or to refuse. 
In earnest, do you think I 'd choose 

That sort of new love to enslave me ? 160 

Mine should have lapped me round from the beginning. 



PROLOGUE. 



109 



As little fear of losing it as winning; 

Lovers grow cold, men learn to hate their wives, 

And only parents' love can last our lives. 

At eve the Son and Mother, gentle pair, 155 

Commune inside our turret ; what prevents 

My being Luigi? While that mossy lair 

Of lizards through the winter-time, is stirred 

With each to each imparting sweet intents 

For this new year, as brooding bird to bird 170 

(For I observe of late, the evening walk 

Of Luigi and his mother always ends 

Inside our ruined turret, where they talk, 

Calmer than lovers, yet more kind than friends). 

Let me be cared about, kept out of harm, 175 

And schemed for, safe in love as with a charm ; 

Let me be Luigi ! — If I only knew 

What was my mother's face — my father, too ! 

Nay, if you come to that, best love of all 

Is God's ; then why not have God's love befall 180 

Myself as, in the palace by the Dome, 

Monsignor? — who to-night will bless the home 

Of his dead brother; and God will bless in turn 

That heart which beats, those eyes which mildly burn 

With love for all men ! I, to-night at least, 185 

Would be that holy and beloved priest. 

Now wait ! — even I already seem to share 

In God's love : what does New- Year's hymn declare .'' 

What other meaning do these verses bear.'* 

All service rafiks the same 7vith God. 190 

If 710W, as formerly he trod 

Paradise., his presence fills 

Our earthy each only as God wills 



no PIPPA PASSES. 

Can work — God^s puppets, best and worst, 

Are we ; there is no last nor first. 195 

Say not 'a small event/' Why ^ small V 

Costs it more pain that this ye call 

A ' great event ' should come to pass, 

Than that? Untwine me from the mass 

Of deeds which make up life one deed zoo 

Power shall fall short in or exceed ! 

And more of it and more of it! — oh, yes — 

I will pass each, and see their happiness, 

And envy none — being just as great, no doubt, 

Useful to men, and dear to God, as they ! 205 

A pretty thing to care about 

So mightily, this single holiday ! 

But let the sun shine! Wherefore repine? 

With thee to lead me, O Day of mine, 

Down the grass-path gray with dew, 210 

Under the pine-wood blind with boughs, 

Where the swallow never flew 

Nor yet cicala dared carouse— 

No, dared carouse ! \She enters the street. 

I.— Morning. Up the Hill-side, inside the Shrub-house. Luca's Wife, 
Ottima, and her Paramour, the German Sebald. 

Sebald \sings^ Let the watching lids wink I 

Day 's a-blaze with eyes, think — 
Deep i?ito the night, driiik ! 
Ottima. Night? Such may be your Rhineland nights, 
perhaps ; 
But this blood-red beam through the shutter's chink — 5 
AVe call such light the morning's : let us see ! 
Mind how you grope your way, though ! How these tall 
Naked geraniums straggle ! Push the lattice 



SCENE I. Ill 

Behind that frame ! — Nay, do I bid you ? — Sebald, 

It shakes the dust down on me ! Why, of course lo 

The slide-bolt catches. — Well, are you content, 

Or must I find you something else to spoil ? 

Kiss and be friends, my Sebald ! Is it full morning? 

Oh, don't speak then ! 

Sebald. Ay, thus it used to be ! 

Ever your house was, I remember, shut 15 

Till midday ; I observed that, as I strolled 
On mornings thro' the vale here : country girls 
Were noisy, washing garments in the brook, 
Hinds drove the slow white oxen up the hills; 
But no, your house was mute, would ope no eye ! 20 

And wisely ; you were plotting one thing there. 
Nature another outside. I looked up — ■ 
Rough white wood shutters, rusty iron bars. 
Silent as death, blind in a flood of light. 
Oh, I remember ! — and the peasants laughed 25 

And said, ' The old man sleeps with the young wife !' 
This house was his, this chair, this window — his ! 

Ottima. Ah, the clear morning! I can see Saint Mark's ; 
That black streak is the belfry. Stop : Vicenza 
Should lie — there 's Padua, plain enough, that blue ! 3° 

Look o'er my shoulder, follow my finger ! 

Sebald. Morning.? 

It seems to me a night with a sun added. 
Where 's dew, where 's freshness .'' That bruised plant, I 

bruised 
In getting thro' the lattice yester-eve. 

Droops as it did. See, here 's my elbow's mark 35 

I' the dust o' the sill. 

Ottitna. Oh, shut the lattice, pray ! 

Sebald. Let me lean out. I cannot scent blood here. 
Foul as the morn may be. 

There, shut the world out ! 



112 PIPPA PASSES. 

How do you feel now, Ottima? There, curse 
The world, and all outside ! Let us throw off 40 

This mask: how do you bear yourself? Let 's out 
With all of it ! 

Ottima. Best never speak of it. 

Sebald. Best speak again and yet again of it, 
Till words cease to be more than words. ' His blood,' 
For instance — let those two words mean ' His blood ' 45 

And nothing more. Notice, I '11 say them now, 
*His blood.' 

Ottifna. Assuredly if I repented 
The deed— 

Sebald. Repent ? who should r^epent, or why ? 
What puts that in your head ? Did I once say 
That I repented .? 

Ottima. No, I said the deed — 50 

Sebald. ' The deed' and ' the event ' — ^just now it was 
* Our passion's fruit ' — the devil take such cant! 
Say, once and always, Luca was a wittol, 
I am his cut-throat, you are — 

Ottima. Here 's the wine ; 

I brought it when we left the house above, 55 

And glasses too — wine of both sorts. Black ? white then? 

Sebald. But am not I his cut-throat ? What are you ? 

Ottima. There trudges on his business from the Duomo 
Benet the Capuchin, with his brown hood 
And bare feet — always in one place at church, 60 

Close under the stone wall by the south entry ; 
I used to take him for a brown cold piece 
Of the wall's self, as out of it he rose 
To let me pass — at first, I say, I used — 
Now, so has that dumb figure fastened on me, 65 

I rather should account the plastered wall 
A piece of him, so chilly does it strike. 
This, Sebald ? 



SCENE L 113 

Sebald. No, the white wine — the white wine ! 

Well, Ottima, I promised no new year 

Should rise on us the ancient shameful way, 70 

Nor does it rise : pour on ! To your black eyes! 
Do you remember last damned New- Year's day? 

Ottima. You brought those foreign prints. We looked at 
them 
Over the wine and fruit. I had to scheme 
To get him from the fire. Nothing but saying 73 

His own set wants the proof-mark, roused him up 
To hunt them out. 

Sebald. Hark you, Ottima, 

One thing 's to guard against. We '11 not make much 
One of the other — that is, not make more 
Parade of warmth, childish officious coil, ^<» 

Than yesterday — as if, sweet, I supposed 
Proof upon proof were needed now, now first, 
To show I love you — yes, still love you — love you 
In spite of Luca and what 's conje to him — 
Sure sign we had him ever in our thoughts, 85 

White sneering old reproachful face and all ! 
We '11 even quarrel, love, at times, as if 
We still could lose each other, were not tied 
By this — conceive you ? 

Ottima. Love ! 

Sebald. Not tied so sure ! 

Because tho' I was wrought upon, have struck 9° 

His insolence back into him — am I 
So surely yours? — therefore, forever yours? 

Ottima. Love, to be wise (one counsel pays another). 
Should we have— months ago, when first we loved, 
For instance that May morning we two stole 95 

Under the green ascent of sycamores — 
If we had come upon a thing like that 
Suddenly — 

8 



114 PIPPA PASSES. 

Scbald. 'A thing'— there again — 'a thing!' 
Ottinia. Then, Venus' body, had we come upon 
My husband Luca Gaddi's murdered corpse loo 

Within there, at his couch-foot, covered close — 
Would you have pored upon it ? Why persist 
In poring now upon it? For 't is here 
As much as there in the deserted house — 
You cannot rid your eyes of it. For me, 105 

Now he is dead I hate him worse ; I hate — 
Dare you stay here? I would go back and hold 
His two dead hands, and say, ' I hate you worse, 
Luca, than ' — 

Scbald. Off, off— take your hands off mine ! 
'T is the hot evening— off! oh, morning, is it? no 

Ottima. There 's one thing must be done — you know what 
thing. 
Come in and help to carry, AV'e may sleep 
Anywhere in the whole wide house to-night. 

Scbald. What would come, think you, if we let him lie 
Just as he is? Let him lie there until 115 

The angels take him ! He is turned by this 
Off from his face beside, as you will see. 

Ottima. This dusty pane might serve for looking-glass. 
Three, four — four gray hairs ! Is it so you said 
* A plait of hair should wave across my neck ? 120 

No — this way. 

Scbald. Ottima, I would give your neck. 

Each splendid shoulder, both those breasts of yours, 
'I'hat this were undone ! Killing 1 Kill the world 
So Luca lives again ! — ay, lives to sputter 
His fulsome dotage on you — yes, and feign 125 

Surprise that I return at eve to sup. 
When all the morning I was loitering here — 
Bid me dispatch my business and begone. 
I would — 



SCENE I. 



115 



Otti?na See ! 

Sebald. No, 1 '11 finish I Do you think 

I fear to speak the bare truth once for all ? 130 

All we have talked of is, at bottom, fine 
To suffer ; there 's a recompense in guilt ; 
One must be venturous and fortunate: 
What is one young for, else? In age we '11 sigh 
O'er the wild, reckless, wicked days flown over ; 13s 

Still we have lived : the vice was in its place. 
But to have eaten Luca's bread, have worn 
His clothes, have felt his money swell my purse — 
Do lovers in romances sin that way? 

Why, I was starving when I used to call 140 

And teach you music, starving while you plucked me 
These flowers to smell ! 

Ottima. My poor lost friend ! 

Sebald. He gave me 

Life, nothing less ; what if he did reproach 
My perfidy, and threaten, and do more — 
Had he no right? What was to wonder at? 145 

He sat by us at table quietly — 
Why must you lean across till our cheeks touch'd ? 
Could he do less than make pretence to strike ? 
'T is not the crime's sake — I 'd commit ten crimes 
Greater, to have this crime wiped out, undone! 150 

And you — O, how feel you? feel you for me? 

Ottima. Well then, I love you better now than ever, 
And best — look at me while I speak to you — 
Best for the crime ; nor do I grieve, in truth. 
This mask, this simulated ignorance, 155 

This affectation of simplicity, 
Falls off our crime ; this naked crime of ours 
May not, now, be looked over — look it down ! 
Great ? let it be great ; but the joys it brought, 
Pay they or no its price? Come : they or it ! 160 



Ii6 PIPPA PASSES. 

Speak not ! The past, would you give up the past 

Such as it is, pleasure and crime together? 

Give up that noon I owned my love for you? 

The garden's silence! even the single bee 

Persisting in his toil suddenly stopped, 165 

And where he hid you only could surmise 

By some campanula's chalice set a-swingt 

Who stammered, 'Yes, I love you'? 

And when I ventured to receive you here, 

Made you steal hither in the mornings — 

Sebald. When 170 

I used to look up 'neath the shrub-house here. 
Till the red fire on its glazed windows spread 
To a yellow haze? 

Ottima. Ah — my sign was, the sun 

Inflamed the sere side of yon chestnut-tree 
Nipped by the first frost. 

Sebald. You would always laugh 175 

At my wet boots : I had to stride ihro' grass 
Over my ankles. 

Ottima. Then our crovvnino^ night ! 

Sebald. The July night ? 

Ottima. The day of it too, Sebald ! 

When heaven's pillars seemed o'erbowed with heat, 
Its black-blue canopy suffered descend 180 

Close on us both, to weigh down each to each, 
And smother up all life except our life. 
So lay we till the storm came. 

Sebald. How it came ! 

Ottima. Buried in woods we lay, you recollect ; 
Swift ran the searching tempest overhead ; 185 

And ever and anon some bright white shaft 
Burned thro' the pine-tree roof — here burned and there, 
As if God's messenger thro' the close wood screen 
Plunged and replunged his weapon at a venture, 



SCENE I. 



117 



Feeling for guilty thee and me : then broke 190 

The thunder like a whole sea overhead — 
Sebald. Slower, Ottima — 
Ottiina. Sebald, as we lay, 

Who said, ' Let death come now ! 't is right to die ! 
Right to be punished ! nought completes such bliss 
But woe !' Who said that ? 

Sebald. How did we ever rise ? 195 

Was 't that we slept ? Why did it end ? 

Otti?na. I felt you. 

Fresh tapering to a point the ruffled ends 
Of my loose locks 'twixt both your humid lips — 
My hair is fallen now: knot it again ! 

Sebald. I kiss you now, dear Ottima, now, and now ! 200 
This way? Will you forgive me — be once more 
My great queen ? 

Ottima. Bind it thrice about my brow ; 

Crown me your queen, your spirit's arbi tress, 
Magnificent in sin. Say that ! 

Sebald. I crown you 

My great white queen, my spirit's arbitress, 205 

Magnificent — 

{From without is heard the voice of PiPPA singing) 
The year ^s at the spring., 
And day ^s at the morn; 
Morning ^s at seven ; 

The hill-side 'j dew-pearled : eio 

The lark ^s on the wi?ig ; 
The snail '>$• 07i the thorn ; 
God 's in his heaven — 
Alps right with the world I 

(PiPPA passes.) 

Sebald. God 's in his heaven ! Do you hear that? Who spoke? 
You, you spoke ! 



Ii8 PIPPA PASSES. 

Ottima. Oh — that little ragged girl ! 216 

She must have rested on the step: we give them 
But this one holiday the whole year round. 
Did you ever see our silk-mills — their inside? 
There are ten silk-mills now belong to you. 220 

She stoops to pick my double heart's-ease — Sh ! 
She does not hear : call you out louder ! 

Sebald. Leave me ! 

Go, get your clothes on — dress those shoulders ! 

Ottima. Sebald ! 

Sebald. Wipe off that paint! I hate you! 

Ottima. Miserable ! 

Sebald. IMy God ! and she is emptied of it now ! 225 
Outright now ! — how miraculously gone 
All of the grace — had she not strange grace once? 
Why, the blank cheek hangs listless as it likes, 
No purpose holds the features up together, 
Only the cloven brow and puckered chin 230 

Stay in their places ; and the very hair, 
That seemed to have a sort of life in it, 
Drops, a dead web ! — • 

Ottima. Speak to me — not of me I 

Sebald. That round great full -orbed face, where not an 
angle 
Broke the delicious indolence — all broken! 235 

Otti??ia. To me — not of me! Ungrateful, perjured cheat! 
A coward, too — but ingrate 's worse than all ! 
Beggar — my slave — a fawning, cringing lie ! 
Leave me! betray me! I can see your drift! 
A lie that walks and eats and drinks ! 

Sebald. My God ! 240 

Those morbid, olive; faultless shoulder-blades — 
I should have known there was no blood beneath ! 

Ottima. You hate me, then ? You hate me, then ? 

Sebald. To think 



INTERLUDE I. „o 

She would succeed in her absurd attempt, 

And fascinate by sinning, show herself 245 

Superior — guilt from its excess superior 

To innocence. That little peasant's voice 

Has righted all again. Though I be lost, 

I know which is the better, never fear, 

Of vice or virtue, purity or lust, 250 

Nature or trick ! I see what I have done. 

Entirely now ! Oh, I am proud to feel 

Such torments — let the world take credit thence— 

I, having done my deed, pay too its price! 

I hate, hate — curse you ! God 's in his heaven ! 

Ottima. Me ! 255 

Me ! no, no, Sebald, not yourself— kill me ! 
Mine is the whole crime. Do but kill me — then 
Yourself — then — presently — first hear me speak! 
I always meant to kill myself — wait, you ! 
Lean on my breast — not as a breast ; do n't love me 260 
The more because you lean on me, my own 
Heart's Sebald! There, there, both deaths presently! 

Sebald. My brain is drowned now — quite drowned : all I 
feel 
Is — is, at swift-recurring intervals, 

A hurry-down within me, as of waters 265 

Loosened to smother up some ghastly pit : 
There they go — whirls from a black, fiery sea ! 

Otti?7ia. Not me — to him, O God, be merciful ! 



Talk by the way, 7vhile PiPPA is passing from the Hill-side to Orcana. 
Foreign StJidents of Paintijig and Scjdpture,from Venice, assembled 
opposite the House ^ Jules, a yonng French Statuary, at Possagna. 

\st Student. Attention! my own post is beneath this win- 
dow, but the pomegranate clump yonder will hide three or 
four of you with a little squeezing, and Schramm and his 



I20 PIPPA PASSES. 

pipe must lie fiat in the balcony. Four, five — who 's a de- 
faulter? We want everybody, for Jules must not be suffered 
to hurt his bride when the jest 's found out. 6 

2d Stiideiii. All here ! Only our poet 's away — never hav- 
ing much meant to be present, moonstrike him! The airs 
of that fellow, that Giovacchino ! He was in violent love with 
himself, and had a fair prospect of thriving in his suit, so un- 
molested was it, — when suddenly a woman falls in love with 
him, too; and out of pure jealousy he takes himself off" to 
Trieste, immortal poem and all — whereto is this prophetical 
epitaph appended already, as Bluphocks assures me — ''Here 
a 7nammoth-poem lies., Fouled to death by butterflies^ His 
own fault, the simpleton ! Instead of cramp couplets, each 
like a knife in your entrails, he should write, says Bluphocks, 
both classically and intelligibly. — y^sculapius, an Epic. Cat- 
alogue of the drugs : Hebe's plaister — 0?ie strip Cools your lip. 
Phoebus' emulsio7i — One bottle Clears your throttle. Mercurfs 
bolus — One box Cures — 21 

2,d Student. Subside, my fine fellow ! If the marriage was 
over by ten o'clock, Jules will certainly be here in a minute 
with his bride. 

2d Student. Good ! — Only, so should the poet's muse have 
been universally acceptable, says Bluphocks, et canibus nos- 
tris — and Delia not better known to our literary dogs than 
the boy Giovacchino ! 28 

\st Student. To the point, now. Where 's Gottlieb, the 
new-comer ? Oh, — listen, Gottlieb, to what has called down 
this piece of friendly vengeance on Jules, of which we now 
assemble to witness the winding-up. We are all agreed, all 
in a tale, observe, when Jules shall burst out on us in a fury 
by and by : I am spokesman — the verses that are to unde- 
ceive Jules bear my name of Lutwyche — but each professes 
himself alike insulted by this strutting stone-squarer, who 
came alone from Paris to Munich, and thence with a crowd 
of us to Venice and Possagno here, but proceeds in a day 



INTERLUDE L 12 1 

or two alone again — oh, alone indubitably ! — to Rome and 
Florence. He, forsooth, take up his portion with these dis- 
solute, brutalized, heartless bunglers ! — so he was heard to 
call us all : now, is Schramm brutalized, I should like to 
know? Am I heartless? 43 

Gottlieb. Why, somewhat heartless ; for, suppose Jules a 
coxcomb as much as you choose, still, for this mere cox- 
combry, you will have brushed off — what do folks style it? — 
the bloom of his life. Is it too late to alter? These love- 
letters, now, you call his — I can 't laugh at them. 48 

4M Studeiit. Because you never read the sham letters of 
our inditing which drew forth these. 

Gottlieb. His discovery of the truth will be frightful. 

^th Student. That 's the joke. But you should have joined 
us at the beginning : there 's no doubt he loves the girl — 
loves a model he might hire by the hour ! 54 

Gottlieb. See here ! ' He has been accustomed,' he writes, 
' to have Canova's women about him in stone, and the world's 
women beside him in flesh ; these being as much below, as 
those above, his soul's aspiration ; but now he is to have 
the reality.' — There you laugh again ! I say, you wipe off the 
very dew of his youth. 60 

1st Student. Schramm ! (Take the pipe out of his mouth, 
somebody) — will Jules lose the bloom of his youth? 

Schramm. Nothing worth keeping is ever lost in this world : 
look at a blossom — it drops presently, having done its service 
and lasted its time ; but fruits succeed, and where would be 
the blossom's place could it continue? As well affirm that 
your eye is no longer in your body, because its earliest favour- 
ite, whatever it may have first loved to look on, is dead and 
done with — as that any affection is lost to the soul when its 
first object, whatever happened first to satisfy it, is supersed- 
ed in due course. Keep but ever looking, whether with the 
body's eye or the mind's, and you will soon find something 
to look on ! Has a man done wondering: at women ? — there 



122 PIP PA PASSES. 

follow men, dead and alive, to wonder at. Has he done 
wondering at men ? — there's God to wonder at : and the 
faculty of wonder may be, at the same time, old and tired 
enough with respect to its first object, and yet young and fresh 
sufficiently, so far as concerns its novel one. Thus — 78 

\st Student. Put Schramm's pipe into his mouth again! 
There, you see : Well, this Jules — a wretched fribble — 
oh, I watched his disportings at Possagno, the other day! 
Canova's gallery — you know : there he marches first resolv- 
edly past great works by the dozen without vouchsafing an 
eye \ all at once he stops full at the PsicLe-fanciiilla — cannot 
pass that old acquaintance v.-ithout a nod of encouragement 
— 'In your new place, beauty? Then behave yourself as 
w^ell here as at Munich — I see you !' Next he posts him- 
self deliberately before the unfinished Pieta for half an hour 
without moving, till up he starts of a sudden, and thrusts his 
very nose into — I say, into — the group ; by which gesture 
you are informed that precisely the sole point he had not 
fully mastered in Canova's practice was a certain method 
of using the drill in the articulation of the knee-joint — and 
that, likewise, has he mastered at length ! Good-bye, there- 
fore, to poor Canova — whose gallery no longer need detain 
his successor Jules, the predestinated novel thinker in mar- 
ble ! 97 

^th Student. Tell him about the women; go on to the 
women ! 

\st Student. Why, on that matter he could never be super- 
cilious enough. How should we be other (he said) than the 
poor devils you see, with those debasing habits we cherish? 
He was not to wallow in that mire, at least; he would wait, 
and love only at the proper time, and meanwhile put up 
with the Psiche-fanciulla. Now I happened to hear of a 
young Greek — real Greek girl at Malamocco ; a true Isl- 
ander, do you see, with Alciphron's 'hair like sea-moss' — 
Schramm knows ! — white and quiet as an apparition, and 



INTERLUDE I. 123 

fourteen years old at farthest, — a daughter of Natalia, so she 
swears — that hag Natalia, who helps us to models at three 
lire an hour. We selected this girl for the heroine of our 
jest. So, first, Jules received a scented letter — somebody 
had seen his Tydeus at the Academy, and my picture was 
nothing to it : a profound admirer bade him persevere — 
would make herself known to him ere long. (Paolina my 
little friend of the Fenke, transcribes divinely.) And in due 
time, the mysterious correspondent gave certain hints of her 
peculiar charms — the pale cheeks, the black hair — whatever, 
in short, had struck us in our Malamocco model : we re- 
tained her name, too — Phene, which is by interpretation sea- 
eagle. Now, think of Jules finding himself distinguished 
from the herd of us by such a creature ! In his very first 
answer he proposed marrying his monitress: and fancy us 
over these letters, two, three times a day, to receive and 
dispatch! I concocted the main of it: relations were in 
the way — secrecy must be observed — in fine, would he wed 
her on trust, and only speak to her when they were indisso- 
lubly united ? St — st — Here tiiey come ! 

6th Student. Both of them ! Heaven's love, speak softly, 
speak within yourselves ! 13° 

5/// Student. Look at the bridegroom ! Half his hair in 
storm, and half in calm, — patted down over the left temple, 
— like a frothy cup one blows on to cool it ! and the same old 
blouse that he murders the marble in ! 

2d Student. Not a rich vest like yours, Hannibal Scratchy ! 
— rich, that your face may the better set it oiT! 136 

6th Student. And the bride ! Yes, sure enough, our Phene ! 
Should you have known her in her clothes ? How magnifi- 
cently pale ! 

Gottlieb. She does not also take it for earnest, I hope ? 140 

\st Student. Oh, Natalia's concern, that is ! We settle with 
Natalia. 

6th Student. She does not speak— has evidently let out no 



124 



PIPPA PASSES. 



word. The only thing is, will she equally remember the rest 
of her lesson, and repeat correctly all those verses which 
are to break the secret to Jules ? 146 

Gottlieb. How he gazes on her ! Pity — pity ! 

\st Student. They go in : now, silence ! You three, — not 
nearer the window, mind, than that pomegranate — ^just where 
the little girl, who a few minutes ago passed us singing, is 
seated ! 151 

II. — Noon. Over Orcana. The House of ]\]'LEs, who crosses its threshold 
with Phene : she is silent, on which JuLES begins. 

Do not die, Phene ! I am yours now, you 

Are mine now ; let Fate reach me how she likes, 

If you '11 not die : so, never die ! Sit here — 

My work-room's single seat : I over-lean 

This length of hair and lustrous front ; they turn 5 

Like an entire flower upward : eyes, lips, last 

Your chin — no, last your throat turns : 't is their scent 

Pulls down my face upon you ! Nay, look ever 

This one way till I change, grow you — I could 

Change into you, beloved ! 

You by me, 10 

And I by you ; this is your hand in mine, 
And side by side we sit : all 's true. Thank God ! 
I have spoken : speak, you ! 

Oh, my life to come ! 
My Tydeus must be carved that 's there in clay; 
Yet how be carved, with you about the room ? 15 

Where must I place you? When I think that once 
This roomful of rough block-work seemed my heaven 
Without you ! Shall I ever work again, 
Get fairly into my old ways again, 

Bid each conception stand while, trait by trait,' 20 

My hand transfers its lineaments to stone? 
Will my mere fancies live near you, their truth — 



SCENE 11. 125 

The live truth, passing and repassing me, 
Sitting beside me ? 

Now speak ! 

Only, first, 
See, all your letters ! Was 't not well contrived ? =s 

Their hiding-place is Psyche's robe ; she keeps 
Your letters next her skin : which drops out foremost? 
Ah,— this that swam down like a first moonbeam 
Into my world ! 

Again those eyes complete 
Their melancholy survey, sweet and slow, 30 

Of all my room holds ; to return and rest 
On me, with pity, yet some wonder too : 
As if God bade some spirit plague a world, 
And this were the one moment of surprise 
And sorrow while she took her station, pausing 35 

O'er what she sees, finds gogd, and must destroy! 
What gaze you at ? Those ? Books, I told you of; 
Let your first word to me rejoice them, too : 
This minion, a Coluthus, writ in red 

Bistre and azure by Bessarion's scribe — 40 

Read this line— no, shame— Homer's be the Greek 
First breathed me from the lips of my Greek girl ! 
My Odyssey in coarse black vivid type 
With faded yellow blossoms 'twixt page and page, 
To mark great places with due gratitude : 45 

* He said, and o?i Antmous directed 
A bitter shaft'— 3. flower blots out the rest 1 
Again upon your search ? My statues, then !— 
Ah, do not mind that— better that will look 
When cast in bronze— an Almaign Kaiser, that, so 

Swart-green and gold, with truncheon based on hip. 
This, rather, turn to ! What, unrecognized ? 
I thought you would have seen that here you sit 
As I imagined you— Hippolyta, 



126 PIPPA PASSES. 

Naked upon her bright Numidian horse. 55 

Recall you this, then? ' Carve in bold relief — 

So you commanded — ' carve, against I come, 

A Greek, in Athens, as our fashion was, 

Feasting, bay-filleted and thunder-free, 

Who rises 'neath the lifted myrtle-branch. to 

" Praise those who slew Hipparchus," cry the guests, 

"While o'er thy head the singer's myrtle waves 

As erst above our champion : stand up, all !" ' 

See, I have laboured to express your thought. 

Quite round, a cluster of mere hands and arms 65 

(Thrust in all senses, all ways, from all sides. 

Only consenting at the branches' end 

They strain toward) serves for frame to a sole face. 

The Praiser's, in the centre, who with eyes 

Sightless, so bend they back to light inside lo 

His brain where visionary forms throng up, 

Sings, minding not that palpitating arch 

Of hands and arms, nor the quick drip of wine 

From the drenched leaves o'erhead, nor crowns cast off, 

Violet and parsley crowns to trample on — 75 

Sings, pausing as the patron-ghosts approve. 

Devoutly their unconquerable hymn! 

But you must say a ' well ' to that — say, ' well !' 

Because you gaze — am I fantastic, sweet? 

Gaze like my very life's-stuff, marble — marbly 80 

Even to the silence ! why before I found 

The real flesh Phene, I inured myself 

To see, throughout all nature, varied stuff 

For better nature's birth by means of art : 

With me, each substance tended to one form 85 

Of beauty — to the human archetype. 

On every side occurred suggestive germs 

Of that — the tree, the flower — or take the fruit, — 

Some rosy shape, continuing the peach. 



SCENE II. 



127 



Curved beewise o'er its bough; as rosy limbs, 9° 

Depending, nestled in the leaves ; and just 

From a cleft rose-peach the whole Dryad sprang ! 

But of the stuffs one can be master of, 

How I divined their capabilities! 

From the soft-rinded smoothening facile chalk 95 

That yields your outline to tlie air's embrace, 

Half-softened by a halo's pearly gloom, 

Down to the crisp imperious steel, so sure 

To cut its one confided thought clean out 

Of all the world. But marble ! — 'neath my tools 100 

More pliable than jelly — as it were 

Some clear primordial creature dug from depths 

In the earth's heart, where itself breeds itself, 

And whence all baser substance may be worked — 

Refine it off to air you may, condense it 105 

Down to the diamond ; — is not metal there. 

When o'er the sudden specks my chisel trips? 

Not flesh, as flake off flake I scale, approach, 

Lay bare those bluish veins of blood asleep? 

Lurks flame in no strange windings where, surprised no 

By the swift implement sent home at once, 

Flushes and glowings radiate and hover 

About its track ? — 

Phene ! what — why is tiiis? 
That whitening cheek, those still-dilating eyes! 
Ah, you will die — I knew that you would die ! 115 

Phene begins, on his having long re??niined silent. 

Now the end 's coming ; to be sure, it must 

Have ended sometime ! Tush, why need I speak 

Their foolish speech ? I cannot bring to mind 

One half of it, beside, and do not care 

For old Natalia now, nor any of them. 120 

Oh, you — what are you ? — if I do not try 



128 PIPPA PASSES. 

To say the words Natalia made me learn, 

To please your friends, — it is to keep myself 

Where your voice lifted me, by letting that 

Proceed; but can it? Even you, perhaps, 12s 

Cannot take up, now you have once let fall, 

The music's life, and me along with that — 

No, or you would ! We '11 stay, then, as we are — 

Above the world. 

You creature with the eyes ! 
If I could look forever up to them, 130 

As now you let me, I believe, all sin. 
All memory of wrong done, suffering borne, 
Would drop down, low and lower, to the earth 
Whence all that 's low comes, and there touch and stay — 
Never to overtake the rest of me, 13s 

All that, unspotted, reaches up to you. 
Drawn by those eyes ! What rises is myself. 
Not me the shame and suffering; but they sink, 
Are left, I rise above them. Keep me so 
Above the world ! 

But you sink, for your eyes 140 

Are altering — altered ! Stay — ' I love you, love — ' 
I could prevent it if I understood ^ 
More of your words to me — was 't in the tone 
Or the words, your power? 

Or stay — I will repeat 
Their speech, if that contents you! Only, change 145 

No more, and I shall find it presently 
Far back here, in the brain yourself filled up. 
Natalia threatened me that harm would follow 
Unless I spoke their lesson to the end, 

But harm to me, I thought she meant, not you. 150 

Your friends — Natalia said they were your friends 
And meant you well — because, I doubted it, 
Observing (what was very strange to see) 



SCENE II. 



129 



On every face, so different in all else, 

The same smile girls like me are used to bear, 155 

But never men, men cannot stoop so low; 

Yet your friends, speaking of you, used that smile, 

That hateful smirk of boundless self-conceit 

Which seems to take possession of the world 

And make of God their tame confederate, 160 

Purveyor to their appetites — you know! 

But still Natalia said they were your friends, • 

And they assented though they smiled the more, 

And all came round me — that thin Englishman 

With light, lank hair seemed leader of the rest; 165 

He held a paper — ' What we want,' said he. 

Ending some explanation to his friends, 

* Is something slow, involved, and mystical. 

To hold Jules long in doubt, yet take his taste 

And lure him on until at innermost 170 

Where he seeks sweetness' soul, he may find — this ! 

As in the apple's core the noisome fly ; 

For insects on the rind are seen at once. 

And brushed aside as soon, but this is found 

Only when on the lips or loathing tongue.' 175 

And so he read what I have got by heart : 

I '11 speak it, — 'Do not die, love ! I am yours ' — 

No — is not that, or like that, part of words 

Yourself began by speaking? Strange to lose 

What cost much pains to learn! Is this more right? 180 

I am a painter who cannot pamt ; 
Ifi my life, a aevil rather than saint, 
In my brain, as poor a creature too — 
No end to all I cannot do ! 

Yet do one thing at least I can — 185 

Love a man, or hate a man 
Supremely : thus my lore began. 
9 



I30 PIPPA PASSES. 

Through the Valley of Love I went , 

In its lovingest spot to abide, 

And just on the verge 7vhere I pitched my tent, 190 

I found Hate dwelling beside. 

{Let the Bridegrooi7i ask what the painter f?ieant 

Of his B?'ide, of the peerless Bride/) 

A7id further, I traversed Hate's Grove, 

In its hatefullest nook to dwell ; 195 

But lo, laliere I flung myself prone, couched Love 

Where the shadow threefold fell I 

( The meaning — those black bride' s-eyes above, 

Not the painter's lip should tell!) 

'And here,' said he, 'Jules probably will ask, 200 

You have black eyes, love — you are, sure enough, 
My peerless bride, — then do you tell, indeed. 
What needs some explanation — what means this?' — 
And I am to go on, without a word — 

So I grew wise in Love a?id Hate, 205 

From simple that I was of late. 

Once, when I loved, I ivould enlace 

Breast, eyelids, hands, feet, form, and face 

Of her I loved, i?t one ein brace — 

As if by mere love I could love imme?tsely / 210 

And when I hated, I would plunge 

My sword, and wipe with the first lunge 

My foe's whole life out like a sponge — 

As if by mere hate I could hate intensely I 

But ?iow I am wiser, know better the fashion 215 

How passion seeks aid from its opposite passion ; 

And if I see cause to love more, or hate more 

Than ever man loved, ever hated, before — 

And seek in the Valley of love 

The nest, or the nook i?i Hate's Grove, 220 



SCENE II. 1^1 

Where my soul may smrly reach 

The essence^ nought less, of each, 

The Hate of all Hates, the Love 

Of all Loves, in the Valley or Grove — 

I find them the very ivarders 225 

Each of the others borders. 

When L love most. Love is disguised 

Ln Hate ; and ivhen Hate is surprised 

In Love, then L hate most : ask 

How Love smiles through Hate's iron casque.^ 230 

Hate grins through Love's rose-braided mask, — 

And how, having hated thee, 

I sought long and painfully 

To reach thy heart, nor prick 

The skin, but pierce to the quick — 235 

Ask this, my yul-'.s, and be afiswered straight 

By thy bride— how the painter Lutwyche can hate I 

Jules interposes. 
Lutwyche ! who else ? But all of them, no doubt, 
Hated me : they at Venice — presently 

Their turn, however ! You I shall not meet : 240 

If I dreamed, saying this would wake me ! 

Keep 
What 's here, the gold — we cannot meet again, 
Consider — and the money was but meant 
For two years' travel, which is over now. 
All chance or hope or care or need of it. 245 

This — and what comes from selling these, my casts 
And books and medals, except — let them go 
Together, so the produce keeps you safe 
Out of Natalia's clutches I — If by chance 
(For all 's chance here) I should survive the gang 250 

At Venice, root out all fifteen of them. 
We might meet somewhere, since the world is wide. 

iErot/t without is heard the voice of PiPPA, singing) 



132 PIPPA PASSES. 

Give her but a least excuse to love me / 
When — where — 

How — can this ai'tn establish her above me, 255 

If fortune fixed her as my lady there., 
There already, to eternally reprove me ? 
(' Hist I ' said Kate the Queen ; 
But ' Oh /' cried the 7naiden, binding her tresses, 

* 'Tis only a page that carols unseen, =60 
Crumbling your howids their messes /') 

Is she wronged 'i — To the rescue of her honour, 

My heart / 

Is she poor ? — What costs it to be styled a donor ? 

Merely an earth to cleave, a sea to part I 265 

But thatfortu7ie should have thrust all this upon her / 

{'Nay, listr bade Kate the Queen; 

And still cried the maiden, bindifig her tresses, 

* ^Tis only a page that carols unseen 

Fitting your hawks their jesses /') 270 

{YlvvK passes.) 
Jules resuvus. 

What name was that the little girl sang forth ? 

Kate ? The Cornaro, doubtless, who renounced 

The crown of Cyprus to be lady here 

At Asolo, where still her memory stays, 

And peasants sing how once a certain page 275 

Pined for the grace of her so far above 

His power of doing good to ' Kate the Queen ' — 

' She never could be wronged, be poor,' he sighed, 

' Need him to help her !' 

Yes, a bitter thing 
To see our lady above all need of us ; 280 

Yet so we look ere we will love ; not I, 
But the world looks so. If whoever loves 
Must be, in sonrie sort, god or worshipper. 



SCENE IL J 23 

The blessing or the blest one, queen or page, 

Why should we always choose the page's part? 285 

Here is a woman with utter need of me, — 

I find myself queen here, it seems ! 

How strange ! 
Look at the woman here with the new soul, 
Like my own Psyche, — fresh upon her lips 
Alit the visionary butterfly, 290 

Waiting my word to enter and make bright, 
Or flutter off and leave all blank as first. 
This body had no soul before, but slept 
Or stirred, was beauteous or ungainly, free 
From taint or foul with stain, as outward things 295 

Fastened their image on its passiveness ; 
Now, it will wake, feel, live — or die again ! 
Shall to produce form out of unshaped stuff 
Be art — and, further, to evoke a soul 
From form be nothing? This new soul is mine! 300 

Now, to kill Lutwyche, what would that do ? — save 

A wretched dauber, men will hoot to death 

Without me, from their laughter ! — Oh, to hear 

God's voice plain as I heard it first, before 

They broke in with their laughter! I heard them 305 

Henceforth, not God! 

To Ancona — Greece — some isle ! 
I wanted silence only ! there is clay 
Everywhere. One may do whate'er one likes 
In art ; the only thing is, to make sure 
'J'hat one does like it — which takes pains to know. 310 

Scatter all this, my Phene — this mad dream ! 
AVho, what is Lutwyche, what Natalia's friends. 
What the whole world except our love — my own, 
Own Phene ? But I told you, did I not. 
Ere night we travel for your land — some isle 315 



1-54 PIPPA PASSES. 

With the sea's silence on it? Stand aside — 

I do but break these paltry models up 

To begin art afresh. Meet Lutwyche, I — 

And save him from my statue meeting him? 

Some unsuspected isle in the far seas ! 320 

Like a god going thro' his world there stands 

One mountain for a moment in the dusk, 

Whole brotherhoods of cedars on its brow ; 

And you are ever by me while I gaze — 

Are in my arms as now — as now — as now ! 325 

Some unsuspected isle in the far seas ! 

Some unsuspected isle in far-off seas ! 



Talk by the way, tohile PiPPA is passing from Orcana to the Turret. Two 
or three of the Austrian Police loitering with Bluphocks, an English 
vagabond, just in view of the Turret. 

Bluphocks* So that is your Pippa, the little girl who 
passed us singing? Well, your Bishop's Intendant's money 
shall be honestly earned: — now, do n't make me that sour 
face because I bring the Bishop's name into the business : 
we know he can have nothing to do with such horrors ; we 
know that he is a saint and all that a bishop should be, 
who is a great man besides. Oh I were but every tvorin a 
maggot., Every fly a grig. Every bough a Christvias fagot. 
Every tune a jig! In fact, I have abjured all religions; 
but the last I inclined to w^as the Armenian : for I have 
travelled, do you see, and at Koenigsberg, Prussia Improper 
(so styled because there 's a sort of bleak hungry sun there), 
you might remark over a venerable house-porch a certain 
Chaldee inscription ; and brief as it is, a mere glance at it 
used absolutely to change the mood of every bearded pas- 
senger. In they turned, one and all ; the young and light- 

* " He maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendcth 
rain on the just and on the unjust." 



INTERLUDE II. 135 

some, with no irreverent pause, the aged and decrepit, with 
a sensible alacrity— 't was the Grand Rabbi's abode, in 
short. Struck with curiosity, I lost no time in learning Syriac 
(these are vowels, you dogs,— follow my stick's end in the 
mud— Celarent, Darii, Ferio !\ and one morning presented 
myself spelling-book in hand, a, b, c,— I picked it out letter 
by letter, and what was the purport of this miraculous posy? 
Some cherished legend of the past you '11 say—' How Moses 
hocus-pocus sed Egypt's land with fly and locust,'— or, ' ffo7v to 
Jonah sounded harshish, Get thee up and go to Tarshish,'— 
or, ' Ho7i> the angel meeting Balaam, Straight his ass returned 
a \alaa7?i: In no wise ! ' Shackabrach—Boach— somebody 
or other— Isaach, Re-cei-ver, Pur-cha-ser, and Ex-chan-ger of— 
Stolen goods!, So talk to me of the religion of a bishop ! I 
have renounced all bishops save Bishop Beveridge— mean to 
live so— and die— y^y so7ne Greek dog- sage, dead and merry, 
Hellward bound in Charon's wherry— With food for both 
worlds, under and upper. Lupine-seed and Hecate's supper, 
and never an obolus —\\-\oug\ thanks to you, or this Intend- 
ant thro' you, or this Bishop thro' his Intendant, I pos- 
sess a burning pocketful of zwa7izigers—to pay the Stygian 

ferry I -^ 

Yst Policeinan. There is the girl, then ; go and deserve 
them the moment you have pointed out to us Signer Luigi 
and his mother. {To the rest) I have been noticing a house 
yonder this long while— not a shutter unclosed since morn- 
ing ! 

2d Policeman. Old Luca Gaddi's, that owns the silk- 
mills here: he dozes by the hour, wakes up, sighs deeply, 
says he should like to be Prince Metternich, and then dozes 
again, after having bidden young Sebald, the foreigner, set 
hts wife to playing draughts. Never molest such a household, 
they mean well. ^^ 

Bluphocks. Only, cannot you tell me something of this 
little Pippa I must have to do with? One could make some- 



136 PIFPA PASSES. 

thing of that name. Pippa — that is, short for Felippa — 
rhyming to — Pafinrge consults Hertrippa—Believ'st thou, King 
Agnppa2 Something might be done with that name. 54 

2d Policeman. Put into rhyme that your head and a 
ripe musk-melon would not be dear at half a zwanziger! 
Leave this fooling, and look out : the afternoon 's over or 
nearly so. 

3// Policeman. Where in this passport of Signor Luigi 
does our Principal instruct you to watch him so narrowly? 
There? what 's there beside a simple signature? (That 
English fool 's busy watching.) 62 

id Policeman. Flourish all round — ' Put all possible ob- 
stacles in his way;' oblong dot at the end — 'Detain him 
till further advices reach you ;' scratch at bottom — ' Send 
him back on pretence of some informality in the above ;' ink- 
spirt on right-hand side (which is the case here) — 'Arrest 
him at once.' Why and wherefore, I do n't concern myself, but 
my instructions amount to this : if Signor Luigi leaves home 
to-night for Vienna, well and good — the passport deposed 
with us for our visa is really for his own use, they have mis- 
informed the Office, and he means well ; but let him stay 
over to-night — there has been the pretence we suspect, the 
accounts of his corresponding and holding intelligence with 
the Carbonari are correct, we arrest him at once, to-morrow 
comes Venice, and presently Spielberg. Bluphocks makes 
the signal sure enough ! That is he, entering the turret with 
his mother, no doubt. 78 

III. — EVEMNG. Inside the Ttirret on the Hill above Asolo. LuiGi and 
his Mother entering. 

Mother. If there blew wind, you 'd hear a long sigh, easing 
The utmost heaviness of music's heart. 

Luigi. Here in the archway ? 

Mother. Oh no, no — in farther, 

Where the echo is made, on the ridge. 



SCENE III. 



137 



Luigi. Here surely, then. 

How plain the tap of my heel as I leaped up ! 
Hark — ' Lucius Junius !' The very ghost of a voice, 
Whose body is caught and kept by — what are those ? 
Mere withered wallflowers, waving overhead? 
They seem an elvish group with thin bleached hair 
That lean out of their topmost fortress — look i 

And listen, mountain men, to what we say, 
Hands under chin of each grave earthy face. 
Up and show faces all of you ! — 'All of you !' 
That 's the king's dwarf with the scarlet comb; old Franz, 
Come down and meet your fate ! Hark — 'Meet your fate !' 

Mother. Let him not meet it, my Luigi — do not i 

Go to his city ! Putting crime aside. 
Half of these ills of Italy are feigned ; 
Your Pellicos and writers for effect 
Write for effect. 

Luigi. Hush ! say A writes, and B. 2 

Mother. These A's and B's write for effect, I say. 
Then, evil is in its nature loud, while good 
Is silent; you hear each petty injury. 
None of his virtues ; he is old beside, 

Quiet and kind, and densely stupid. Why 2 

Do A and B not kill him themselves ? 

Luigi. They teach 

Others to kill him — me — and, if I fail. 
Others to succeed ; now, if A tried and failed, 
I could not teach that : mine 's the lesser task. 
Mother, they visit night by night — 

Mother. You, Luigi.? 3' 

Ah, will you let me tell you what you are.^* 

Luigi. Why not 1 Oh, the one thing you fear to hint, 
You may assure yourself I say and say 
Ever to myself. At times — nay, even as now 
We sit — I think my mind is touched, suspect v. 



138 PIPPA PASSES. 

All is not sound ; but is not knowing that 

What constitutes one sane or otherwise? 

I know I am thus — so all is right again. 

I laugh at myself as through the town I walk, 

And see men merry as if no Italy 40 

Were suffering; then I ponder — 'I am rich, 

Young, healthy; why should this fact trouble me 

More than it troubles these ?' But it does trouble. 

No, trouble 's a bad word ; for as I walk 

There 's springing and melody and giddiness, as 

And old quaint turns and passages of my youth. 

Dreams long forgotten, little in themselves. 

Return to me — whatever may amuse me. 

And earth seems in a truce with me, and heaven 

Accords with me, all things suspend their strife, 50 

The very cicala laughs 'There goes he, and there ! 

Feast him, the time is short ; he is on his way 

For the world's sake: feast him this once, our friend !' 

And in return for all this, I can trip 

Cheerfully up the scaffold-steps. I go ss 

This evening, mother ! 

Mother. But mistrust yourself — 

Mistrust the judgment you pronounce on him! 

Luigi. Oh, there I feel — am sure that I am right ! 

Mother. Mistrust your judgment, then, of the mere means 
To this wild enterprise : say you are right, 60 

How should one in your state e'er bring to pass 
What would require a cool head, a cold heart, 
And a calm hand ? You never will escape. 

Luigi. Escape? To even wish that would spoil all. 
The dying is best part of it. Too much 65 

Have I enjoyed these fifteen years of mine, 
To leave myself excuse for longer life : 
Was not life pressed down, running o'er with joy, 
That I might finish with it ere my fellows 



SCENE III. 



139 



Who, sparelier feasted, make a longer stay? 70 

I was put at the board-head, helped to all 

At first; I rise up happy and content. 

God must be glad one loves his world so much. 

I can give news of earth to all the dead 

Who ask me : — last year's sunsets, and great stars 75 

That had a right to come first and see ebb 

The crimson wave that drifts the sun away — 

Those crescent moons with notched and burning rims 

That strengthened into sharp fire, and there stood, 

Impatient of the azure — and that day So 

In March, a double rainbow stopped the storm — 

May's warm, slow, yellow moonlit summer nights-^ 

Gone are they, but I have them in my soul ! 

Mother. (He will not go !) 

Luigi. You smile at me ? 'T is true, — 

Voluptuousness, grotesqueness, ghastliness, 85 

Environ my devotedness as quaintly 
As round about some antique altar wreathe 
The rose festoons, goats' horns, and oxen's skulls. 

Mother.^ See now : you reach the city, you must cross 
His threshold — how? 

Luigi. Oh, that 's if we conspired ! 90 

Then would come pains in plenty, as you guess — 
But guess not how the qualities most fit 
For such an office, qualities I have. 
Would little stead me otherwise employed, 
Yet prove of rarest merit only here. 95 

Every one knows for what his excellence 
Will serve, but no one ever will consider 
For what his worst defect might serve ; and yet 
Have you not seen me range our coppice yonder 
In search of a distorted ash ? I find 100 

The wry spoilt branch a natural perfect bow ! 
Fancy the ihrice-sage, thrice-precautioned man 



140 



PIPPA PASSES 



Arriving at the palace on m}' errand ! 

No, no ! I have a handsome dress packed up — 

White satin here, to set off my black hair ; X05 

In I shall march— for you may watch your life out 

Behind thick walls, make friends there to betray you ; 

More than one man spoils everything. March straight — 

Only no clumsy knife to fumble for! 

Take the great gate, and walk (not saunter) on no 

Thro' guards and guards — I have rehearsed it all 

Inside the turret here a hundred times. 

Do n't ask the way of whom you meet, observe, 

But where they cluster thickliest is the door 

Of doors; they '11 let you pass — they '11 never blab 115 

Each to the other, he knows not the favourite. 

Whence he is bound and what 's his business now. 

Walk in — straight up to him ; you have no knife : 

Be prompt, how should he scream ? Then, out with you ! 

Italy, Italy, my Italy ! 120 

You 're free, you 're free ! Oh, mother, I could dream 

They got about me — Andrea from his exile. 

Pier from his dungeon, Gualtier from his grave ! 

Mother. Well, you shall go. Yet seems this patriotism 
The easiest virtue for a selfish man 125 

To acquire. He loves himself — and next, the world — 
If he must love beyond — but nought between : 
As a short-sighted man sees nought midway 
His body and the sun above. But you 
Are my adored Luigi, ever obedient 130 

To my least wish, and running o'er with love; 
I could not call you cruel or unkind. . 
Once more, your ground for killing him ! — then go ! 

Luigi. Now do you try me, or make sport of me ? 
How first the Austrians got these provinces — 135 

If that is all, I '11 satisfy you soon — 
Never by conquest but by cunning, for 



SCENE HI. 141 

That treaty whereby — 

Mother. Well ? 

Liiigi. (Sure he 's arrived, 

The telltale cuckoo — Spring 's his confidant, 
And he lets out her April purposes !) 14° 

Or — better go at once to modern time — 
He has — they have — in fact, I understand 
But can 't restate the matter ; that 's my boast : 
Others could reason it out to you, and prove 
Things they have made me feel. 

Mother. Why go to-night? h5 

Morn 's for adventure. Jupiter is now 
A morning-star. I cannot hear you, Luigi ! 

Luigi. ' I am the bright and morning-star,' saith God — 
And, ' to such an one I give the morning-star !' 
The gift of the morning-star ! Have I God's gift 150 

Of the morning-star.? 

Mother. Chiara will love to see 

That Jupiter an evening-star next June. 

Luigi. True, mother. Well for those who live through 
June ! 
Great noontides, thunder-storms, all glaring pomps 
Which triumph at the heels of June the God 155 

Leading his revel thro' our leafy world. 
Yes, Chiara will be here — 

Mother. In June : remember, 

Yourself appointed that month for her coming. 

Luigi. Was that low noise the echo ? 

Mother. The night-wind. 

She must be grown — with her blue eyes upturned 160 

As if life were one long and sweet surprise : 
In June she comes. 

Lutgi. We were to see together 

The Titian at Treviso. There, again ! 

{From without is heard the voice of PiPPA singing) 



142 



PJPPA PASSES, 

A king lived long ago, 

In the morning of the worlds j^s 

When earth was nigher heaven than now ; 
And the king's locks curled. 
Disparting o'er a forehead full 
As the milk-white space Uwixt horn and horn 
Of so7ne sacrificial bull — 17° 

Only calm as a babe new-bor?i : 
For he was got to a sleepy mood, 
So safe f'om all decrepitude, 
Age with its bane, so sure gone by — 
The gods so loved him while he dreamed, >75 

That, having lived thus long, there seemed 
No need the kifig should ever die. 

Luigi. No need that sort of king should ever die ! 

Among the rocks his city was : 

Before his palace, in the sun, , »8o 

He sat to see his people pass, 
And Judge them every one 
From its threshold of smooth stone. 
They haled him many a valley- thief 

Caught in the sheeppens, robber-chief 185 

Swarthy and shameless, beggar-cheat. 
Spy-prowler^ or rough pirate found 
On the sea-sand left aground ; 
And sometijnes clung about his feet. 

With bleeding lip and burning cheek, 190 

A wo?na7i, bitterest ivrong to speak 
Of one with sullen thickset brows ; 
And sometimes fro7n the prison-house 
The angry priests a pale wretch brought. 
Who through some chink had pushed and pressed, 195 

On knees and elbows, belly a?id breast, 



SCENE III. 143 

Worm like into the temple^ — caught 
At last there by the very god, 
Who ever in the darkness strode 

Backward and forward, keepiiig watch 200 

O'er his brazen bowls, such rogues to catch ! 
These, all and every one, 
The king judged, sitting in the sun. 

Luigi. That king should still judge sitting in the sun ! 

His councillors, on left and right, 205 

Looked anxious up,— but no surprise 

Disturbed the kijig' s old smiling eyes., 

Where the very blue had turned to white. 

'T is said, a Python scared one day 

The breathless city, till he came, 210 

Withforky tongue and eyes on flame. 

Where the old king sat to judge alway ; 

But when he saw the sweepy hair, 

Girt ivith a crow7i of berries rare 

Which the god will hardly give to wear 215 

To the maiden 7vho singeth, danciiig bare 

In the altar- smoke by the pine-torch lights, 

At his tvondrous forest rites — 

Seeing this, he did not dare 

Approach that threshold in the sun, 220 

Assault the old king smiling there. 

Such grace had kings ivhen the ivorld begun I 

{VwVK passes.) 

Luigi. And such grace have they, now that the world 
ends ! 
The Python at the city, on the throne, 

And brave men, God would crown for slaying him, 225 

Lurk in bye-corners lest they fall his prey. 



144 PIPPA PASSES. 

Are crowns yet to be won, in this late time, 

Which weakness makes me hesitate to reach? 

'T is God's voice calls, how could I stay ? Farewell ! 

Talk by the zuay, while PiPPA is passing from the Turret to the Bishop's 
bjother's House, close to the Duonio Santa Maria. Poor Girls sitting 
on the steps. 

\st Girl. There goes a swallow to Venice — the stout sea- 
farer ! 
Seeing those birds fly, makes one wish for wings. 
Let us all wish; you, wish first! 

2d Girl. I ? This sunset 

To finish. 

3^ Girl, That old — somebody I know. 
Grayer and older than my grandfather, s 

To give me the same treat he gave last week — 
Feeding me on his knee with fig-peckers, 
Lampreys, and red Breganze-wine, and mumbling 
The while some folly about how well I fare. 
Let sit and eat my supper quietly — lo 

Since had he not himself been late this morning, 
Detained at — never mind where, — had he not — 
*Eh, baggage, had I not!' — 

2d Girl. How she can lie ! 

\st Girl. My turn. 

Spring 's come and summer 's coming : I would wear 
A long loose gown — down to the feet and hands, 15 

With plaits here, close about the throat, all day; 
And all night lie, the cool long nights, in bed ; 
And have new milk to drink, apples to eat, 
Deuzans and junetings, leather-coats — ah, I should say, 
That is away in the fields — miles ! 

3^ Girl. Say at once ao 

You 'd be at home— she 'd always be at home I 
Now comes the story of the farm among 



INTERLUDE III. j .^ 

The cherry orchards, and how April snowed 

White blossoms on her as she ran. Why, fool, 

They 've rubbed the chalk-mark out, how tall you were, 25 

Twisted your starling's neck, broken his cage, 

Made a dunghill of your garden ! 

\st Girl. They destroy 

My garden since I left them? well— perhaps ! 
I would have done so — so I hope they have ! 
A fig-tree curled out of our cottage wall ; 30 

They called it mine, I have forgotten why, 
It must have been there long ere I was born : 
Cric — eric — I think I hear the wasps o'erhead 
Pricking the papers strung to flutter there 
And keep off birds in fruit-time — coarse long papers, 35 

And the wasps eat them, prick them through and through. 

3^ Girl. How her mouth twitches ! Where was I ? — before 
She broke in with her wishes and long gowns 
And wasps — would I be such a fool? — Oh, here! 
See how that beetle burnishes in the path ! 40 

There sparkles he along the dust; and, there — 
Your journey to that maize-tuft spoiled at least! 

1st Girl. When I was young, they said if you killed one 
Of those sunshiny beetles, that his friend 
Up there would shine no more that day nor next. 45 

2d Girl. When you were young? Nor are you young, 
that 's true I 
How your plump arms, that were, have dropped away! 
Why, I can span them ! Cecco beats you still? 
No matter, so you keep your curious hair. 
I wish they 'd find a way to dye our hair 50 

Your colour — any lighter tint, indeed. 
Than black — the men say they are sick of black, 
Black eyes, black hair ! 

4M Girl. Sick of yours, like enough! 

Do you pretend you ever tasted lampreys 

10 



146 PIPPA PASSES. 

And ortolans? Giovita, of the pahice, 55 

Engaged (but there 's no trusting him) to slice me 
Polenta with a knife that had cut up 
An ortolan. 

2d Girl. Why, there ! is not that Pippa 
We are to talk to, under the window, — quick, — 
Where the lights are? 

\st Girl. That she? No, or she would sing. 60 

For the Intendant said — 

3^ Girl. Oh, you sing first ! 

Then, if she listens and comes close — I '11 tell you, 
Sing that song the young English noble made. 
Who took you for the purest of the pure, 
And meant to leave the world for you — what fun ! 65 

2d Girl. [Sings] 

You ^11 love me yet I — and I can tarry 

Your love's proti'aded growing : 
ywie reared that bunch of flowers you carry 

From seeds of April's solving. 

I plant a heaj'tful 7iow : some seed 70 

At least is sure to strike 
And yield — what you 'II ?iot pluck indeed^ 

Not love, but, may be, like. 

You '11 look at least on love's remains, 

A grave's one violet : 75 

Your look ? — that pays a thousand pains. 

What 's death ? — you 'II love me yet ! 

T^d Girl. {To Pippa, who approaches) Oh, you may come 
closer — we shall not eat you ! Why, you seem the very per- 
son that the great rich handsome Englishman has fallen so 
violently in love with! I '11 tell you all about it. si 



SCENE IV. i^y 



IV. — N IGHT. The Palace by the Duonio. Monsignor, dismissing his At- 
tendants. 

Moiisignor. Thanks, friends, many thanks. I chiefly de- 
sire Hfe now, that I may recompense every one of you. Most 
I know something of ah-eady. What, a repast prepared? 
Benedido benedicatur — ugh — ugh! Where was I? Oh, 
as you were remarking, Ugo, the weather is mild, very 
unHke winter-weather ; but I am a Sicilian, you know, and 
shiver in your Julys here. To be sure, when 't was full sum- 
mer at Messina, as we priests used to cross in procession the 
great square on Assumption Day, you might see our thickest 
yellow tapers twist suddenly in two, each like a falling star, 
or sink down on themselves in a gore of wax. But go, my 
friends, but go! \To the Inte7idant\ Not you, Ugo! \The 
others leave the apartment^ I have long wanted to converse 
with you, Ugo ! m 

Inte7idant. Uguccio — 

Monsignor. — 'guccio Stefani, man! of Ascoli, Fermo, 
and Fossombruno ; — what I do need instructing about, are 
these accounts of your administration of my poor brother's 
affairs. Ugh ! I shall never get through a third part of 
your accounts : take some of these dainties before we at- 
tempt it, however. Are you bashful to that degree ? For 
me, a crust and water suffice. 22 

Intejidant. Do you choose this especial night to question 



me 



Monsignor. This night, Ugo. You have managed my late 
brother's affairs since the death of our elder brother — four- 
teen years and a month, all but three days. On the 3d of 
December, I find him — • 28 

Inte7ida7it. If you have so intimate an acquaintance with 
your brother's affairs, you will be tender of turning so far 
back: they will hardly bear looking into, so far back. 

Monsig7ior. Ay, ay, ugh, ugh, — nothing but disappointments 



148 PIPPA PASSES. 

here below ! I remark a considerable payment made to 
yourself on this 3d of December. Talk of disappointments ! 
There was' a young fellow here, Jules, a foreign sculptor I 
did my utmost to advance, that the Church might be a gainer 
by us both : he was going on hopefully enough, and of a sud- 
den he notifies to me some marvellous change that has hap- 
pened in his notions of art. Here 's his letter : ' He never had 
a clearly conceived ideal within his brain till to-day. Yet 
since his hand could manage a chisel, he has practised ex- 
pressing other men's ideals ; and, in the very perfection he 
has attained to, he foresees an ultimate failure : his uncon- 
scious hand will pursue its prescribed course of old years, 
and will reproduce with a fatal expertness the ancient types, 
let the novel one appear never so palpably to his spirit. 
There is but one method of escape: confiding the virgin type 
to as chaste a hand, he will turn painter instead of sculptor, 
and paint, not carve, its characteristics,' — strike out, I dare 
say, a school like Correggio : how think you, Ugo ? 50 

Intendant. Is Correggio a painter.? 

Monsigftor. Foolish Jules! and yet, after all, why foolish? 
He may — probably will, fail egregiously; but if there should 
arise a new painter, will it not be in some such way by a 
poet now, or a musician — spirits who have conceived and 
perfected an ideal through some other channel — transfer- 
ring it to this, and escaping our conventional roads by pure 
ignorance of them ; eh, Ugo ? If you have no appetite, talk 
at least, Ugo ! 59 

Iiitetidant. Sir, I can submit no longer to this course of 
yours. First, you select the group of which I formed one, — 
next you thin it gradually, — always retaining me with your 
smile, — and so do you proceed till you have fairly got me 
alone with you between four stone walls. And now then.? 
Let this farce, this chatter, end now — what is it you want 
with me ? 66 

Monsignor. Ugo ! 



SCENE IV. j^g 

Intendant. From the instant you arrived, I feft your smile 
on me as you questioned me about this and the other article 
in those papers — why your brother should have given me 
this villa, that podere, — and your nod at the end meant — 
what ? 72 

Monsigtior. Possibly that I wished for no loud talk here, 
if once you set me coughing, Ugo ! — 

Intendant. I have your brother's hand and seal to all I 
possess : now ask me what for ! what service I did him — 
ask me ! ^^ 

Monsignor. I would better not : I should rip up old dis- 
graces, let out my poor brother's weaknesses. By the way, 
Maffeo of Forli — which, I forgot to observe, is your true name 
— was the interdict ever taken off you, for robbing that church 
at Cesena? 82 

Inte?idaiit. No, nor needs be ; for when I murdered your 
brother's friend, Pasquale, for him — 

Monsignor. Ah, he employed you in that business, did he? 
Well, I must let you keep, as you say, this villa and thatpo- 
dere, for fear the world should find out my relations were of 
so indifferent a stamp! Maffeo, my family is the oldest in 
Messina, and century after century have my progenitors gone 
on polluting themselves with every wickedness under heav- 
en : my own father — rest his soul! — I have, I know, a 
chapel to support that it may rest ; my dear two dead broth- 
ers were — what you know tolerably well ; I, the youngest, 
might have rivalled them in vice, if not in wealth, but from 
my boyhood I came out from among them, and so am not 
partaker of their plagues. My glory springs from another 
source ; or if from this, by contrast only, — for I, the bishop, 
am the brother of your employers, Ugo. I hope to repair 
some of their wrong, however : so far as my brother's ill- 
gotten treasure reverts to me, I can stop the consequences 
of his crime ; and not one so/do shall escape me. Maffeo, 
the sword we quiet men spurn away, you shrewd knaves pick 



15° 



PIPPA PASSES. 



up and commit murders with; what opportunities the virtu- 
ous forego, the villainous seize. Because, to pleasure myself, 
apart from other considerations, my food would be millet- 
cake, my dress sackcloth, and my couch straw, — am I there- 
fore to let you, the offscouring of the earth, seduce the poor 
and ignorant, by appropriating a pomp these will be sure 
to think lessens the abominations so unaccountably and ex- 
clusively associated with it? Must I let villas and poderi 
go to you, a murderer and thief, that you may beget by 
means of them other murderers and thieves ? No — if my 
cough would but allow me to speak ! 113 

IfiteJidant. What am I to expect? You are going to punish 
me ? 

Monsignor. Must punish you, Maffeo. I cannot afford to 
cast away a chance. I have whole centuries of sin to re- 
deem, and only a month or two of life to do it in. How 
should I dare to say — 

Intendant. ' Forgive us our trespasses ?' 120 

Monsignor. My friend, it is because I avow myself a very 
worm, sinful beyond measure, that I reject a line of conduct 
you would applaud, perhaps. Shall I proceed, as it were, a- 
pardoning? — I, who have no symptom of reason to assume 
that aught less than my strenuousest efforts will keep myself 
out of mortal sin, much less keep others out. No: I do 
trespass, but will not double that by allowing you to trespass. 

Intendant. And suppose the villas are not your brother's 
to give, nor yours to take ? Oh, you are hasty enough just 
now ! 130 

Mo7isignor. t, 2 — N0..3 ! — ay, can you read the substance 
of a letter. No. 3, 1 have received from Rome ? It is precisely 
on the ground there mentioned, of the suspicion I have that 
a certain child of my late elder brother, who would have suc- 
ceeded to his estates, was murdered in infancy by you, Maf- 
feo, at the instigation of my late brother — that the Pontiff 
enjoins on me not merely the bringing that Maffeo to con- 



SCENE IV. i^i 

dign punishment, but the taking all pains, as guardian of 
the infant's heritage for the Church, to recover it parcel by 
parcel, howsoever, whensoever, and wheresoever. While you 
are now gnawing those fingers, the police are engaged in 
sealing up your papers, Maffeo, and the mere raising my 
voice brings my people from the next room to dispose of 
yourself. But I want you to confess quietly, and save me 
raising my voice. Why, man, do I not know the old story t 
The heir between the succeeding heir, and this heir's ruf- 
fianly instrument, and their complot's effect, and the life of 
fear and bribes and ominous smiling silence? Did you 
throttle or stab my brother's infant ? Come, now ! 149 

Intendatit. So old a story, and tell it no better? When 
did such an instrument ever produce such an effect? Either 
the child smiles in his face, or, most likely, he is not fool 
enough to put himself in the employer's power so thorough- 
ly ; the child is always ready to produce — as you say — how- 
soever, wheresoever, and whensoever. 155 

Mo7isignor. Liar ! 

Intendant. Strike me ? Ah, so might a father chastise ! I 
shall sleep soundly to-night at least, though the gallows await 
me to-morrow ; for what a life did I lead ! Carlo of Cesena 
reminds me of his connivance, every time I pay his annuity 
— which happens commonly thrice a year. If I remonstrate, 
he will confess all to the good bishop — you ! 

Mofisignor. I see thro' the trick, caitiff! I would you 
spoke truth for once. All shall be sifted, however — seven 
times sifted. 165 

Jjitendant. And how my absurd riches encumbered me ! 
I dared not lay claim to above half my possessions. Let 
me but once unbosom myself, glorify heaven, and die ! — 
Sir, you are no brutal, dastardly idiot like your brother I 
frightened to death : let us understand one another. Sir, I 
will make away with her for you — the girl— here close at 
hand ; not the stupid obvious kind of killing ; do not speak — 



152 PIPPA PASSES. 

know nothing of her or me! I see her every day — saw 
her this morning. Of course there is to be no killing ; but at 
Rome the courtesans perish off every three years, and I can 
entice her thither — have, indeed, begun operations already. 
There 's a certain lusty, blue-eyed, florid-complexioned Eng- 
lish knave I and the police employ occasionally. You as- 
sent, I perceive — no, that 's not it — assent I do not say — but 
you will let me convert my present havings and holdings 
into cash, and give me time to cross the Alps.'' 'T is but 
a little black-eyed, pretty singing Felippa, gay silk-winding 
girl. I have kept her out of harm's way up to this present \ 
for I always intended to make your life a plague to you wiih 
her. 'T is as well settled once and forever. Some women 
I have procured will pass Bluphocks, my handsome scoun- 
drel, off for somebody; and once Pippa entangled! — you 
conceive? Through her singing? Is it a bargain ? iss 

{From wii/ioiii is heard the voice <?/ Pippa singijig) 

Overhead the tree-tops meet^ 

Flowers and grass spring ^neath ojie's feet ; 190 

The7-e was nought above me, nought below, 
My childhood had not learned to know ; 
For what are the voices of birds — 
Ay, and of beasts — but words, our words ^ 
Only so 7nuch fnore sweet? 195 

The knowledge of that with my life begun. 
But I had so near made out the sun. 
And counted your stars, the seven and one. 
Like the fingers of my ha7id : 

Nay, I could all but understand 2co 

Wherefore through heaven the white moon ranges ; 
And just when out of her soft fifty changes 
No uff ami liar face might overlook me — 
Suddenly God took me I 

(Pippa passes.) 



EPILOGUE. J ^2 

Moftsignor. \Springmgup^ My people — one and all — all 
— within there ! Gag this villain — tie him hand and foot ! 
He dares — I know not half he dares — but remove him — 

quick ! Miserere 7fiei, Do7nme I quick, I say ! 208 

Pippa's Chaviber again. She enters it. 
The bee with his comb, 
The mouse at her dray, 
The grub in its tomb. 
Wile winter away : 

But the fire-fly and hedge-shrew and lob-worm, I pray, 5 

How fare they ? 

Ha, ha, best thanks for your counsel, my Zanze ! 
' Feast upon lampreys, quaff the Breganze ' — 
The summer of life so easy to spend, 

And care for to-morrow so soon put away ! 10 

But winter hastens at summer's end. 
And fire-fly, hedge -shrew, lob-worm, pray. 
How fare they ? 

No bidding me then to— what did she say ? 
' Pare your nails pearlwise, get your small feet shoes 15 

More like ' — what said she ? — ' and less like canoes !' 
How pert that girl was ! — would I be those pert. 
Impudent, staring women ? It had done me, 
However, surely no such mighty hurt 

To learn his name who passed that jest upon me : 20 

No foreigner, that I can recollect. 
Came, as she says, a month since, to inspect 
Our silk-mills — none with blue eyes and thick rings 
Of raw-silk-coloured hair, at all events. 

Well, if old Luca keep his good intents, 25 

We shall do better, see what next year brings ! 
I may buy shoes, my Zanze, not appear 
More destitute than you perhaps next year ! 
Bluph — something ! I had caught the uncouth name 



154 



PIPPA PASSES. 



But for Monsignor's people's sudden clatter 3° 

Above us — bound to spoil such idle clatter 

As ours; it were, indeed, a serious matter 

If silly talk like ours should put to shame 

The pious man, the man devoid of blame, 

The — ah, but — ah, but, all the same, 35 

No mere mortal has a right 

To carry that exalted air; 

Best people are not angels quite : 

While — not the worst of people's doings scare 

The devil ; so there 's that proud look to spare ! 40 

Which is mere counsel to myself, mind ! for 
I have just been the holy Monsignor ! 
And I was you too, Luigi's gentle mother. 
And you too, Luigi ! — how that Luigi started 
Out of the turret — doubtlessly departed 45 

On some good errand or another, 
For he passed just now in a traveller's trim, 
And the sullen company that prowled 
About his path, I noticed, scowled 

As if they had lost a prey in him. 50 

And I was Jules the sculptor's bride, 
And I was Ottima beside, 
And now what am I ? — tired of fooling. 
Day for folly, night for schooling! 

New-Year's day is over and spent, 55 

111 or well, I must be content ! 

Even my lily 's asleep, I vow : 
Wake up — here 's a friend I 've plucked you ! 
Call this flower a heart's-ease now ! 

Something rare, let me instruct you, 60 

Is this, with petals triply swollen, 
Three times spotted, thrice the pollen. 
While the leaves and parts that witness 
The old proportions and their fitness 



EPILOGUE. 155 

Here remain unchanged, unmoved now — 65 

Call this pampered thing improved now ! 

Suppose there 's a king of the flowers, 

And a girl-show held in his bowers — 

'Look ye, buds, this growth of ours,' 

Says he, 'Zanze from the Brenta, 7° 

I have made her gorge polenta 

Till both cheeks are near as bouncing 

As her — name there 's no pronouncing ! 

See this heightened colour too, 

For she swilled Breganze wine 75 

Till her nose turned deep carmine — 

'Twas but white when wild she grew. 

And only by this Zanze's eyes 

Of which we could not change the size, 

The magnitude of all achieved s° 

Otherwise may be perceived !' 

Oh, what a drear, dark close to my poor day ! 

How could that red sun drop in that black cloud ? 

Ah, Pippa, morning's rule is moved away, 

Dispensed with, never more to be allowed ! 85 

Day's turn is over — now arrives the night's. 

O lark, be day's apostle 

To mavis, merle, and throstle, 

Bid them their betters josde 

From day and its delights ! 9° 

But at night, brother howlet, over the woods. 

Toll the world to thy chantry; 

Sing to the bats' sleek sisterhoods 

Full complines with gallantry : 

Then, owls and bats, 95 

Cowls and twats, 

Monks and nuns, in a cloister's moods, 

Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry ! 

{^After she has bes^uu to undress herself. 



156 PIPPA PASSES. 

Now, one thing I should like to really know : 

How near I ever might approach all these 100 

I only fancied being, this long day — 

Approach, I mean, so as to touch them, so 

As to — in some way — move them — if you please, 

Do good or evil to them some slight way. 

For instance, if I wind 105 

Silk to-morrow, my silk may bind 

[Sitting on the bedside. 

And broider Ottima's cloak's hem. 

Ah, me and my important part with them, 

This morning's hymn half promised when I rose! 

True in some sense or other, I suppose, "o 

[As she lies down. 

God bless me ! I can pray no more to-night. 

No doubt, some way or other, hymns say right. 
All sennce ranks the sa?ne with God — 
With God, whose puppets, best and worst, 
Are we: there is no last nor first. 115 

\She sleeps. 




NOTES. 



ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE NOTES. 

Cf. (co7i/er), compare. 
Fol., following. 
Id. (idem), the same. 

Imp. Diet., Ogilvie's Imperial Dictionary (Century Co.'s ed., New York. 1883). 
Mrs. Orr, Mrs. Sutherland Orrs Handbook to tJie Works 0/ Robert Browning {2d. 
ed., London, 1886), 
Prol., prologue. 

Skeat, Rev. W. W Skeat's Etym.ological Dictionary (London, 1881). 
Wb., Webster's Dictionary (revised quarto ed.). 
Wore, Worcester's Dictionary (quarto ed.). 

The abbreviations of the names of Shakespeare's plays will be readily understood. 
The line-numbers are those of the " Globe " ed. 

The references by page to poems by Browning not included in this book are to 
Houghton, Mifflin, & Co. 's complete ed. of his works. 



NOTES. 



HERVfi KIEL. 

"This spirited poem was sent to the Comhill because Browning was 
asked for a subscription to the fund for sending food to Paris after the 
siege by the Germans in 1870-71. Though he condemned Louis Na- 
poleon's war, he wished to help the French in their distress, and he sent 
to the fund the ;!^ioo that Mr. George Smith gave him for Herve Riel. 
The subject of the poem, and its generous treatment, surely manifolded 
the good-will of the gift. An English poet restored to France its ' For- 
gotten Worthy.' An Englishman sang the praise of a French sailor's 
balking the English fleet. One of the nation whose boast is that her he- 
roes need no other motive for their noble deeds than ' England expects 
every man to do his duty,' showed that in France too — whose citizens 
were accused of seeking glory and vainglory as their dearest gain — was 
a man who could act out Nelson's words with no thought of Nelson's 
end — 'A peerage or Westminster Abbey,' — but just do his duty because 
it lay before him, and put aside with a smile the reward offered him for 
doing it : a real Man, an honour to the nation and the navy of which he 
was part. 

"The facts of the story had been forgotten and were denied at St. 
Malo, but the Reports >-o the French Admiialty at the time were looked 
up and the facts established. See the Account in the Prornetiade an 
Croisic, by Gustave Grandpre, iii. 186, and Notes sur le Croisic, by Caillo 
Jeune, p. 67, a 'Croisic Guide-Book.' Browning's only alteration is 
that Herve Kiel's holiday to see his wife, 'La Belle Aurore,' was to last 
not a day only, but his lifetime: 'Ce brave homme ne demanda pour 
recompense d'un service aussi signale, qn'ujt conge absolu pour rejoindre 
sa femme, qu'il nommait la Belle Aurore'''''' {Browning Society Papers, 
Part L pp.65, 163). 

Herve Riel was written at Le Croisic, the home of the hero. It is a 
small fishing-village near the mouth of the Loire. 

A charge of hasty work is often made against Mr. Browning. As a 
test of its truth, we insert in the notes the readings of certain lines in an 
earlier MS. copy of HerTe Riel — written in 1869. The changes invaria- 
bly make for clearness and vigor, and especially for that smoothness 
which Browning is popularly supposed to disdain. 

I. At the Hogue. The Cape of the Hogue {Cap la Hoiigue) must not be 
confounded with that of la Hague, from which it is distant some thirty 



l6o NOTES. 

miles, on the eastern side of the same peninsula. The naval battle re- 
ferred to took place on the 19th of May, 1692 (Old Style), when the united 
fleets of the English and Dutch defeated and nearly destroyed the expe- 
dition prepared by Louis XIV. for a descent on England, with the design 
of restoring James II. to the throne. The action began at a distance from 
the coast, between Cape Barfleur (which is north of the Hogue) and the 
Isle of Wight, After a running fight the French, in three divisions, re- 
tired to their own coast, pursued by the English. Three of the largest 
ships, including the admiral's, sought refuge in the harbor of Cherbourg, 
where they were blown up by the enemy. How some of the other ships 
had better luck is explained in the poem. 

2. Fight. The MS. has "meet." 

5. St. Malo is on a small island at the mouth of the Ranee. It is con- 
nected with the mainland by a causeway, 650 feet long. Its harbor is 
perfectly dry at low water ; but the tide rises forty-five or fifty feet. 

7. Victor. The MS. has "victors." 

15. Then the pilots. The MS. has "The pilots." 

16. Why, etc. The MS. reads : " What hope to pass for ships like 
these? laughed they." 

18. Twelve and eighty. We should expect "two and ninety;" but 
Browning gives the literal translation of the French qiiatre-vingt-douze. 

19. Single narrow way. The MS. has " narrow channel way," 
21, And with flow. See on 5 above. The MS. omits a«^/. 

24. Or water runs. The MS. omits or. 

25. Not a ship xvill leave the bay. The MS. has " Not a vessel leaves 
the way," 

27. And. The MS. has "as." 

29. That's. Omitted in the MS. 

30. Plymouth, in the southwest of England (Devon) is one of the most 
important British naval stations, and has the finest dock-yards in the 
world. The Sound is large and easy of access. The MS. omits For. 

34. Let. The MS. has "Bid." 
37. But 710 such word. The MS. omits But. 

39. Up stood. The German fashion of compounding verbs is sanc- 
tioned only by the rough emphasis needed for this line. 

43. Tourville, the French admiral, had defeated the combined Dutch 
and English fleets two years before, and pursued the English to the 
Thames. Again, in '93, he revenged himself for La Hogue by the vic- 
tory of Cape St. Vincent. 

44. Crosickese. OfLeCroisic; as yJ/f^?/^?/////^ below = of St. Malo. 

49. Greve. The sands extending for many square leagues round Mont 
St. Michel are known as La Gj-eve. They are left bare for four or five 
hours by the fall of the tide. 

51. And eve. The MS. omits ««^. . 

53. And anchored. The MS. has " stationed." 

54. Fleet. The MS. has " ships." 

55. Believe me, there's a 2uay. The MS. bus "Believe there 's ample 
wav." 

58. Get this. The MS. has "the " for this. 



CLIVE. i6i 

59. Make the others folloio mine. The MS. has "Keep the twenty-one 
by mine." 

69. Captains^ give the sailor place. This line is not included in the or- 
der of DamfreviUe. It is like Browning to fling in this vivid, hasty word 
from the poet to the *' Captains." He stands for the instant on the ad- 
miral's deck with his own lips at the trumpet. 

74. Clears. The MS. has " Takes." v£'///rj'=:entrance. 

75. As its inch, etc. As if its inch, etc. ; a common Elizabethan use 
of as. 

89. The bay. That of St. Michel. 

92. Raiiipired Solidor. A feudal fort on the mainland, built in the 
I4ih century, and forming a part of the defences of the harbor. For 
rampired (an earlier form oi ramparted), cf. Shakespeare, T, 0/ A.v. ^ 
47 : " our rampired gates." 

93. How hope. MS. has " How the hope." 

94. Outburst. The MS. has "Cry." 
^d. France's. The MS. has " the." 

108. You have saved, etc. The MS. reads : 

*' You must name your own reward 
Who have saved the king his ships. 
Demand whate'er you will. 
'Faith, our sun was nigh eclipse!" 

Faith is, of course=:in faith, but there is no reason for printing ''Faith^ 
as Browning does. 

114. Theu. The MS. has "And," 

116. As. The MS. has "And." 

120. F7-om Malo Roads to Croisic Point. A hundred miles across coun- 
try. For Point the MS. has " Bank." 

121. Since 't is ask. The MS. transposes 121 and 122. 

125. That he asked, etc. The MS. omits the line. This is the best 
example of the added vigor of the revision. 

128. Feat. The MS. has " thing." 

129. A head. That is, a figure-head. 

132. All that France saved, etc. The MS. reads: " What the French 
saved from the fight, whence the English bore the bell." 

134. The heroes, etc. The historical portraits in the gallery of the 
Louvre. 

1 36. You shall look, etc. The MS. reads: "Eye shall range long 
enough ere it stop at Herve Riel." 



CLIVE. 

Robert Clive was born in Shropshire in 1725. He was the son of a 
tradesman, an idle dare-devil of a boy, whom his friends were glad to 
pack off to Madras in the service of the East India Company. His 
early days there were days of wretchedness and despair. Twice he at- 
tempted suicide and failed. But a change came at last. In the war of 

II 



I62 NOTES. 

the Austrian succession the French resolved to expel the English from 
India. Madras was besieged, razed, and its clerks and merchants cap- 
tured. Clive escaped in disguise, and joined the Company's force as an 
ensign. 'Jlie French allied with the Emperor of India made rapid con- 
quests, and Trichinopoly, the one town which held out against the na- 
bob of the Carnatic, was all but brought to surrender when Clive (1751) 
came forward with a daring scheme tor its relief With a few hundred 
green troops he surprised, in a thunderstorm, Arcot, the nabob's capital, 
and held it for fifty days against thousands of assailants. Released by re- 
inforcements, he led handfuls of cowardly Sepoy troops to equally splen- 
did victories in the field, and, in short, completely routed the French. 

The climate proving unfavorable to his health, he returned to England in 
1753. Two years later he went back as Governor of Fort St. David. At 
once he was called to avenge the hideous Indian massacre of Bengal. A 
hundred and fifty English traders had been thrust by Surajah Dowlah into 
the Black Hole, and after one night only twenty-three remained alive. 
Clive sailed for Bengal with 3000 men. When he faced the Indian 
army on the plain of Plassey the odds were so great that on the very 
eve of the battle a council of war advised an English retreat. Clive 
withdrew to a neighboring grove, and after an hour's lonely musing 
gave the word to fight. With his 3000 men he gained an incredible vic- 
tory over the nabob's army of 60,000. With the victory of Plassey be- 
gan the empire of England in the East. 

After another visit to England Clive returned in 1765 to India, to at- 
tempt reform in the English service there. The two years of his rule 
were in fact the most glorious of his life. He returned to England 
poorer than he went, to face the storm raised at home among those who 
were profiting by Indian abuses. But he had roused a new interest in 
the subject of India, and an investigation of the whole administration 
was begun by a committee of the Commons. Clive's own early acts 
were examined with unsparing severity. But the memory of his great 
deeds won from the House, at last, a unanimous vote " that Robert Lord 
Clive did at the same time render great and meritorious services to his 
countrv." 

Broken in health by long residence in India, and in spirit by his trial, 
he died by his own hand in London in 1774. 

The above is condensed from Green's Short History of the Euglish 
People. For further details see Life of Clive, by Sir John Malcolm. 

The anecdote which forms the basis of Clive was told to Mr. Brown- 
ing in 1846 by Mrs. Jameson, who had shortly before heard it at Lans- 
dovvne House, from Macaulay. 

The poem was first published in Dramatic Idylls (ii.) in 1880. 

8. Flnssy. The place is in the presidency of Bengal, about eighty miles 
north of Calcutta. The battle was fought on the 23d of June, 1757. The 
more common spelling of the name is Plassey. 

12. This forthri;rht, that vieaiider. A reminiscence of Shakespeare, 
Tempest, iii. 3. 3 : *' Through forthrights and meanders ;" that is, straight 
paths and winding ones. 

16. Rnmvier-glass. A sort of drinking-glass, such as Rhenish wme 



CLIVE. 163 

is usually drunk in ; also, a brimmer, or glass of any liquor filled to the 
top. The glasses were probably so called because used in former times 
in the Romersaal at Frankfort, when they drank the new emperor's 
health. If so, the word is Latin, from Roma, Rome (Skeat). 

23. Tic/dish. Tickling, pleasing. 

40. Arcot. This old Mohammedan capital of the Carnatic is on the 
Palaur, seventy miles to the southwest of Madras. 

47. Bee's -wing. A peculiar film in port-wine, indicative of age. The 
word is but just finding its way into American dictionaries, being given 
only in the supplements of Webster and Worcester. 

50. As his scale-7nair s 7varty iron, etc. A line whose sound empha- 
sizes its sense, — onomatopoetic. 

Cuirasses. Not in the dictionaries as a verb. Browning, like Shake- 
speare, turns a noun into a verb when it suits his purpose. 

65. A drug-box. With opium in it. Cf 77 below. There is an anti- 
thetical point in " honest liquor." 

70. What said Pitt? Pitt entered the House of Commons from a 
borough owned by Clive. Clive was not above the corrupter political 
methods of gain. There was little obligation on the part of Pitt, since 
the bargain for a seat from a " Borough-monger " was purely a commer- 
cial matter. But the Great Commoner seems to have maintained a warm 
admiration for Clive. 

89. When he spoke, etc. Browning has caught the two most striking 
symptoms of the victi.n of the opium-habit; the fixed though dazed re- 
gard of some indifferent object, and the lifeless, monotonous voice. 

94. At a factor's elbow. His company at the card-table. 

loi. Cock (?' the Walk. A conceited bully. 

103. Over one green baize. Over the same card-table. 

111. Force a card. A gambler's trick by which the person holding the 
cards determines the cut and so the trump. 

112. Thyrsis . . . Chloe. Now generic names for a rustic and his 
love ; first used by Theocritus in one of his idyls. 

190. Brought the late-ejected devil, etc. Cf. Matt, xii, ^<^,Luke xi. 24. 
222. Tenant at the Frenchinan'' s will. See note on title. 
240. We V/ Jiope condoned. Compare Apparent Failure, 7 : 

" It 's wiser being good than bad ; 

It 's safer being meek than fierce: 

It 's fitter being sane than mad. 
My own hope is. a sun will pierce 
The thickest cloud earth ever stretched ; 
That, after Last, returns the First, 
Though a wide compass round be fetched ; 
That what began best, can 't end worst, 
Nor what God blessed once, prove accurst."* 

* Dramatis Persottee, p. 252. 



164 



NOTES. 



" now THEY BROUGHT THE GOOD NEWS FROM GHENT 
TO AIX." 

The " Good News " is that of the " Pacification de Gaiit," concluded 
in 1576. It was a treaty of union between Holland, Zealand, and the 
southern Netherlands, against Spain, under the tyrannical Philip H. The 
treaty was greeted rapturously by the frontier cities, because it was ex- 
pected to free the Netherlands from Spanish power. 

" There is," writes Mr. Browning, " no sort of historical foundation 
about ' Good News from Ghent.' I wrote it under the bulwark of a 
vessel off the African coast, after I had been at sea long enough to ap- 
preciate even the fancy of a gallop on the back of a certain good horse 
' York,' then in my stable at home. It was written in pencil on the fly- 
leaf of Bartoli's Simholi, I remember." 

While there is, then, no historical foundation for the "gallop," the 
verisimilitude of the situation is perfect. Aix might easily have resolved 
to set herself on fire at a given hour, rather than submit herself and her 
citizens piecemeal to the torch of the persecutor. The "horse without 
peer "might possibly have galloped the ninety-odd miles between Ghent 
and Aix, but the feat would be a marvellous one. 

10. Piqiie. The pommel of the saddle. ^Ve state this on authority 
of an army officer, although the meaning is in none of the dictionaries. 

14. Lokereu. A town twelve miles from Ghent, in a direction a little 
north of east. 

15. Boom. Sixteen miles due east from Lokeren. 

16. Diiffeld, or Duff'el, is about twelve miles east of Boom, and a few 
miles north of Mechlin, 

17. Meckel ti. The contracted form oi Mecheleii, the Flemish form of 
Mechlin (French, Malines). The church steeple is the lofty (324 feet) 
though unfinished tower of the Cathedral of St. Rombold. Like many 
of the great Belgian churches, it is noted for its chimes. 

18. Aerschot. All the eds. spell the name Aershot ; but the sch is pro- 
nounced like sk. The town is fifteen miles from Duffel. 

31. Hasselt. The capital of the province of Limbourg. It is about 
twenty-four miles from Aerschot, and almost eighty from Ghent by the 
route described. Dirck had, indeed, "galloped bravely." 

38. Looz. This town is seven or eight miles due south from Hasselt, 
and Tongres is also out of the direct road to Aix-la-Chapelle. We should 
expect the riders to take the route via Maastricht. By rail it is forty- 
one miles from Hasselt to Aix, and the highway cannot be much less. 

41. Dalhein. Apparently some village near Aix. It cannot be the 
frontier-town Dalheim, for that lies too far to the north. The doine- 
spire is probably the cupola of the "octagon" of the cathedral, built by 
Charlemagne and containing his tomb. 

46. Her fate. Self-imposed, of course. See note on the title. 

52. His pet-name. The skill which leaves the tenderness of the "pet- 
name" to our imagination is beyond praise. 



THE LOST LEADER. 



THE LOST LEADER. 



165 



There has been much idle discussion over the original of The Lost 
Leader. Wordsworth, Southey, Charles Kingsley, have all been as- 
signed to the enviable (?) position of Mr. Browning's model. The fol- 
lowing note from Mr. Browning ought to settle the matter. It is pub- 
lished in the Preface to a recent edition of Wordsworth's Prose : 

" 19 Warwick-Crescent, W., Feb. 24, '75. 
"Dear Mr. Grosart, — I have been asked the question you now ad- 
dress me with, and as duly answered it, I can 't remember how many 
times ; there is no sort of objection to one more assurance, or rather con- 
fession, on my part, that I did in my hasty youth presume to use the great 
and venerated personality of Wordsworth as a sort of painter's model ; 
one from which this or the other particular feature may be selected and 
turned to account : had I intended more, above all, such a boldness as 
portraying the entire man, I should not have talked about 'handfuls of 
silver and bits of ribbon.' These never influenced the change of politics 
in the great poet ; whose defection, nevertheless, accompanied as it was 
by a regular face-about of his special party, was to my juvenile apprehen- 
sion, and even mature consideration, an event to deplore. But just as in 
the tapestry on my wall I can recognize figures which have struck out a 
fancy, on occasion, that though truly enough thus derived, yet would be 
preposterous as a copy, so, though I dare not deny the original of my lit- 
tle poem, I altogether refuse to have it considered as the 'very effigies' 
of such a moral and intellectual superiority. 

"Faithfully yours, Robert Browning." 

20. Whom the rest bade aspire. The allusion is, of course, to the health- 
ful discontent and aspiration which the Liberals tried to nourish among 
the lower classes. 

23. One more deviVs-triinnph. The original reading was "One more 
triumph for devils." 

30. Menace oiir heart, etc. The reading was originally " Aim at our 
heart ere we pierce through his own." 



THE BISHOP ORDERS HIS TOMB AT ST. PRAXED'S 
CHURCH. 

St. Praxedis (or Praxedes), the Virgin, was the daughter of Pudens, a 
Roman Senator, the friend of St. Paul (2 7»//. iv. 21). She lived till the 
time of Antoninus Pius, and was distinguished for her devotion, her sim- 
plicity, and her good works. An oratory is said to have been built 
above her grave m Rome by Pius I. in A.D. 499. This building was de- 
stroyed A.D. 822, and the present church erected by Paschal I. During 
the absence of the popes at Avignon it fell to ruin, but was restored by 



1 66 NOTES. 

Nicholas V. in the 15th century, and by St. Charles Borromeo in 1564. 
I'he mosaics of the church are especially remarkable. All the stone- 
work is of the rarest. The tribune is ascended by a flight of steps com- 
posed of large slabs of rosso antic c. The pillars on each side of the high 
altar are of white marble beautifully carved with foliage. St. Praxed's 
Slab (on which she slept) is of nero-bianco granite. One of the chapels is 
entered by a doorway formed of two columns of the rare black porphyry 
and granite, suj^porting an elaborately sculptured frieze. The outer and 
inner walls are covered with mosaics. From their richness this chapel 
was called Or to del Faradiso, or the Garden of Paradise. It contains one 
of the most celebrated relics in Rome — the column to which Christ was 
bound. It is a curious fact that so elaborate a church should have risen 
in honor of a maiden whose distinguishing virtue was her simplicity. To 
complete the contrast, to-day no woman is allowed to enter this rich chap- 
el except on Sundays in Lent. At other times they can only look into it 
through a grating. 

Opposite the side entrance to the Orto del Paradiso is the tomb of Car- 
dinal Cetive (1474) with his sleeping figure, which reminds us of the Bish- 
op's design for his tomb, whereon he is to "lie through centuries" 
(80 fol.). 
3. Nephews — sons. Passing for the former, though really the latter. 
5. Old Gandolf. The Bishop's predecessor and hated rival. 
15. I foui^/it, etc. Other great ecclesiastics have thus looked out for 
their final resting-place in advance. The late pope Pius IX., for exam- 
ple, prepared a mausoleum for himself in the basilica of Santa Maria 
Maggiore by constructing in front of and beneath the high altar a splen- 
did chamber approached by broad stairways and lined with the most pre- 
cious marbles and alabaster ; but as his death approached he changed 
his mind and desired to be buried "with the poor" in San Lorenzo. 
21. On the epistle-side. The right-hand side, as one faces the altar. 
23. Aery. Airy ; a poetical word used by Keats and others, but rare. 
Milton has "aery-light'' in P. L. v. 4, and " More aery" in Id. v. 481. 

25. Basalt, a hard, fine-grained rock of volcanic origin. On a slab of 
this the recumbent statue of the Bishop is to be placed, with a tabernacle, 
■ or canopy, above him supported by columns oi peach-blossom marble. 
28. Anselvi. His favourite son, then standing at the foot of his bed. 
31. Onion-stone. Browning's translation of cipolin ( Italian cipollino, 
properly a little onion, from cipolla, onion, so called because made up of 
different strata, one lying upon another), a greenish marble, containing 
white or greenish zones. " Our stupid habit of using foreign words with- 
out translation is continually losing us half the force of the foreign lan- 
guage. How many travellers hearing the term ^cipollino'' recognize the 
intended sense of a stone splitting into concentric coats, like an onion?" 
(Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. iv. p. 361.) 

41. Olive-frail. A basket made of rushes, used for packing olives. 

42. Lapis-lazuli. A beautiful stone of a bright blue color, much val- 
ued for ornamental work. It is found in rounded masses of a moderate 
size, like the Jeivs-head here. 

46. Frascati. A favorite resort, twelve miles from Rome, on the slope 



THE BISHOP ORDERS HIS TOMB. 167 

of the Alban Hills. It was built in 1191 on the ruins of a villa overgrown 
with underwood {frasc/ic), whence its name. 

48. Like God the Ealher's glohe, etc. In the great Jesuit church (// 
Gesii) in Rome, the altar of St. Ignatius is adorned with a group of the 
Trinity by Bernardino Lndovisi. The Father holds a globe, which is 
said to be the largest piece oi laf^is-laznli in existence. 

51. Swift as a xveaver's shuttle, etc. Cf. Job, vii. 6. 

54. Aiitiqiie-bhick. " ' Nero-antico ' is more familiar to our ears; but 
Browning does right in translating it, as 'cipoUino' into 'onion-stone' " 
(Ruskin). See on 31 above. 

55. My frieze to come beneatJi. That is, the sculptured upper part of the 
sides of the tomb, which is like an oblong box with the slab for a cover. 
This kind of tomb, with its recumbent statue, and with or without the 
elaborate canopy over it, is the most common type of funeral monument 
in European churches. 

58. Some tripod, thyrsus. The juxtaposition of the tripod (the symbol 
of Delphic wisdom) and the thyrsus (the symbol of Bacchic revels) is a 
fit introduction to the general chaos of Christian and Pagan art which 
follows. The spirit of the Renaissance is exactly typified by the conceit 
of making the mischievous Pan next neighbor to St. Praxed on the one 
hand and Moses on the other. 

66. Travertine. A white, hard, semi-crystalline limestone, deposited 
from the waters of springs or streams holding lime in solution. The 
name is a corruption of the Latin Tiburtimis, from Tibur, now Tivoli, 
near Rome. 

69. Jasper. Probably the variety known as blood-stone, deep green 
with blood-red spots. No stone takes a finer j^olish. 

71. Pistachio-nut. Known also as the green almond. The kernel is 
shaped like that of the almond, but is a delicate green. 

77. Tullfs. Cicero {Marcus Tullius). 

79. Ulpinn. Who did not flourish until long after the Augustan age 
of Latin literature. 

82. See God made and eaten. In the Eucharist. 

87. A crook. The bishop's crosier. 

89. Mortcloth. Pall. 

95. St. Praxed at his sermon on the vtount. The Saviour and the fe- 
male saint appear to be confused in the Bishop's wandering thoughts. 
Cf 59, 60 above. 

99. Eiucescebat. Blunderingly formed as if from a verb Elncescere. The 
verb " to be notable " (naturally used in an epitaph) is Elucere. Evident- 
ly, then, Eiucescebat is not "choice Latin." 

loi. Evil and brief etc. Cf. Job, xiv. I. 

108. A visor and a Term. A mask ; and a terminal figure, so-called, 
that is, a half-statue or bust, not placed upon, but springing from a square 
pillar (the Latin terminus). Both these, like the tripod, thyrsus, etc., are 
Pagan or classical emblems. 

III. Entablature. This term includes not only \\\t frieze, h\x\. the hor- 
izontal mouldings above and below it. 

116. Gritstone. A coarse-grained variety of sandstone. 



1 68 NOTES. 



RABBI BEN EZRA. 

"One of the deepest and weightiest of all Browning's works. My fa- 
vorite one. It contains the Philosophy of Life" (Furnivall). 

Rabbi Ben Ezra, or Ibn Ezra, was born at Toledo in Spain about 1092 
or 1093 A.D., or in 1088, according to one authority. He was poor, but 
studied hard, wrote patriotic poems, married, had a son Isaac (also a 
poet), travelled in Africa, the Holy Land, Persia, India, Italy, France, 
and England. He wrote treatises on Hebrew grammar, astronomy, and 
mathematics, besides commentaries on the books of the Bible, etc. He 
died in 1 167. His commentary on Isaiah has been translated into Eng- 
lish, and published by the Society of Hebrew Literature (London, 1873). 

15. Do I remonstrate, etc. Age has a satisfaction more keen than that 
of youth's restless desire to possess the matchless flower or the transcen- 
dent star. 

16. Rather I prize the doubt, etc. Cf. Tennyson, In Memoriam, xcv. : 

" There lives more faith in honest doubt, 
Believe me, than in halt the creeds." 

24. Irks. Annoys. The verb was at first used personally, as here. 
Cf. Surrey, ^;/«r/, ii. 18: "The Grekes chieftaines all irked with the 
war;" Udall, John, x\\. : " ignominie irketh them muche," etc. After- 
wards it came to be employed only impersonally ; as often in Shake- 
speare, Spenser, and other Elizabethan writers. Cf. F. Q. vi. 10. 29: 

" Sayd Calidore : ' Now sure it yrketh inee. 
That to thy blisse I made this luckelesse breach,'" etc. 

The simple sense here is that care and doubt do not distress beasts, 
whose sole pleasure is feasting. 

31. Then welcome, etc. Compare Easter Day, xxxiii. : 

" Happy that I can 
Be thwarted as a man, 
Not left in God's contempt apart 
With ghastly smootli life, dead at heart, 
Tame in earths paddock as her prize." 

40. What I aspired, etc. Compare Lowell's Longing: 

"The thing we long for. that we are 
For one transcendent moment." 

52. Dole. Share, or portion dealt. 

84. Indue. Put on ; its original sense. This word, from the Latin 
induere, is not to be confounded with eudiie or indite, which is merely an- 
other form of endow. 

151. Ay, note that Potter''s wheel, etc. Cf the splendid episode in the 
Rubaiydt of Omar Khayyam, stanzas 83-90. See also Isa. xxix. 16. 

156. Seize the day. Cf. Horace, Od. i. 1 1. 8 : " Carpe diem, quam mi- 
nimum credula postero." 



BEN KARSHOOK.—CHILDE ROLAND. 169 

169. What though, etc. The figure of the Potter is continued to the 
end of the poem. 

178. The new wijie^s foaming Jio7u, etc. For the figure (suggested of 
course by Matt. xxvi. 29) cf. Mrs. Browning's Past a7id Future: 

" Dear Christ ! when thy new vintage fills my cup. 
This hand shall shake no more, nor that wine spill." 



BEN KARSHOOK'S WISDOM. 

This poem was printed in The Keepsake in 1856. It has, strangely, 
never been included in any volume of Browning's works. 

It seems clear that it was written before Men and Women was pub- 
lished (1855), and that it was meant to be part of that work ; for in 0)ie 
Word More, 135, 136, Browning says : 

" I am mine and yours— the rest be all men's, 
Kar shook, Cleon, Norbert, and the fifty." 

But in the later Tauchnitz Edition of 1872 the Karshook is altered into 
KarsJiish — the narrator of one of the long poems in the volume. 

2. Karshoofi. The name means in Hebrew a thistle. 

17. The Hiram's- Hammer, ^\.c. See I A7;/^-.y, vii. 13-22. The figvna- 
tive use here is thoroughly Oriental. 



"CHILDE ROLAND TO THE DARK TOWER CAME." 

This poem has enjoyed for some time the reputation of being one of 
the most obscure and inexplicable pieces of work done by its most ob- 
scure and inexplicable author. We try the experiment of printing it 
without one note exce)ot an introductory one. The following article by 
Mr. Arlo Bates (from The Critic for A]jril 26, 1886) throws a flood of 
light upon the poem, and should, we think, make it intelligible even to 
the mind unaccustomed to Browning's method : 

" Without meaning to* analyze, to expound, and least of all to explain 
a poem from which I would fain keep my hands as reverently as from 
the Ark, I ask the poet's pardon for saying that to me Childe Roland is 
the most supreme expression of noble allegiance to an ideal — the most 
absolute faithfulness to a principle, regardless of all else ; perhaps I can- 
not better express what I mean than by saying the most thrilling crystal- 
lization of that most noble of human sentiments, of which a bright flower 
is the motto Noblesse oblige. 

•' Ineffable weariness — that state when the cripple's skull-like laugh 
ceased to irritate, that most profound condition of lassitude, when even 
trifles cannot vex — begins the poem; with glimpses behind of the long 
experience of one who has seen hope die, effort fade, and — worse than 
all — enthusiasm waste, until even success seemed valueless. A state of 
exhaustion so utter that nothing but an end, even though it be failure, 



J 'JO AZOTES. 

could arouse even the phantom of a desire. Then negative objective 
desolation, so to say ; dreariness around in landscape, starved foliage, 
and on up to the loathsome horse. Then subjective misery; a failure 
of the very memories which in sheer desperation the hero calls up to 
strengthen him in an hour whose awful numbness stupefies him. Then, 
when once more relief is sought outside, impressions that are positively 
disheartening; a suggestion of conflict that brings an overwhelming im- 
oression that all the powers of evil actively pervade this place ; then — 
5;he Round Tower ! 

" What does it matter what the tower signifies — whether it be this, 
that, or the other ? If the poem means anything, it means, I am sure, 
everything in this line. The essential thing is that, after a lifetime 
pledged to this — whatever the ideal be — the opportunity has come after 
a cumulative series of disheartenments, and more than all amid an over- 
whelming sense that failure must be certain where so many have failed ; 
where nature and unseen foes and the ghosts of all his baffled comrades 
stand watching for his destruction, where defeat is certain and its igno- 
miny already cried aloud by the winds of heaven. And the sublime cli- 
max comes in the constancy of the hero: 

' In a sheet of flame 
I saw them and I knew them all. And yet 
Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set 
And blew.' 

The nominal issue of the conflict is no matter, because the real issue is 
here ; with the universe against him, with the realization of all this, 
dauntless he gives his challenge ! 

*' The whole poem is a series of cumulative effects, of which the end is 
a fitting climax. One cannot read it without a tingling in every fibre of 
his being, and a stinging doubt whether in such a case he might not 
have been found wanting. I cannot conceive of anything more com- 
plete, more noble, more inspiring. Heaven forbid that any one should 
so mistake what I have written as to suppose I think I have 'explained ' 
Childe Kolatid. I have already said that I believe the meaning of the 
poem could be put in no other words than those of Mr. Browning ; and 
what I have said does not even attempt to convey a hundredth part of 
what that glorious poem means to me. Mr. Browning hitnself very likely 
would smile at what I have written ; but I hope the smile might have in 
it more of tolerance than of anger." 

Richard Grant White, in his Introduction to Selections from Robert 
Browniiiifs Poetns, has a passage which may throw additional light on 
this poem, if any is needed. 



THE BOY AND THE ANGEL. 

The Boy and the Angel was published in Hood''s Magazine, August, 
1844. ^ix poems by Browning were printed in this magazine between 
june, 1844, and April, 1845. At that time he was not in the habit of 



TIVO CAMELS. 



171 



contributing to magazines, but yielded to an appeal to help poor Hood, 
who was dying by inches during these months. 

The Boy and the Angel was reprinted in the seventh number of Beits 
ami Pomegranates in November, 1845. It has especial interest for the 
student, because many changes were made in this later edition. One 
additional couplet, also, was introduced in the collected edition issued 
by Mr. Browning in 1863. 

13. As well as if. The ist ed. omits As well. 

23. God said hi heaven. The ist ed. has " In heaven, God said." 

27. Entered in flesh. The 1st ed. omits in flesh. 

28. Lived there. The 1st ed. omits these two words. 

29. And mornin^^ evening, noon, and night. The 1st ed. has ** And 
morn, noon, eve, and night." 

35. And ever. The 1st ed. has " Yet ever," and omits on earth in the 
next line. 

37, 38. Lie did, etc. This couplet was inserted in 1863. 

46. The flesh disgnise. The 1st ed. omits disguise. 

48. Saint Peter'' s dome. The ist ed. has "the dome." 

51. Dixht. Decked. Cf. Milton, VAll. 62 : "The clouds in thousand 
liveries dight." 

55, 56. Since when, etc. This couplet and the next were inserted in 

1845. 

59. And rising. The 1st ed. has " How rising," thus connecting the 
couplet with 54. 

62. And on his sight, etc. The 1st ed. has " And in the Angel burned." 

63. I l)ore thee, etc. This couplet was inserted in 1845. 

66. Vain was thy dream, etc. The 1st ed. has " Vainly hast thou lived 
many a year." 

67. Thy voice's praise, ^\c. This couplet was inserted in 1845. 

71, ^2. With that iveak voice, etc. This couplet was inserted in 1845. 
73-76. Back to the cell, etc. As recast in 1845, except that Resume has 
since been put for " Become." The reading of the ist ed. was : 

" 'Be again the boy all curled ; 
I will finish with the world.' 

Theocrite grew old at home, 
Gabriel dwelt in Peter's dome." 



TWO CAMELS. 

Ferishtah's Fancies was published in 1884. The idea of it grew out of 
a fable by Pilpay, which Browning read when a child. He put this into 
verse, and then added other episodes to it until now the poem consists 
of twelve Fancies and as many lyric Interludes. Ferishtah is a Persian 
dervish whose wisdom brings to him many inquirers after truth. He re- 
plies to each by a parable or " Fancy." ' Txvo Camels, which we quote, 
is the eighth in'the series. 

There is much of Browning's peculiar mingling of humor and ieri- 



1^2 NOTES, 

ousness in all these poems. He is so especially anxious that we shniild 
not miss this flavor that he prints opposite the title-page the following 
passages : 

•' His genius was jocular, but, when disposed, he could be very seri- 
ous." — Article " Shakespear," Jeremy Collier's Historical, &'c., Die- 
tionary, 2d edition, 1701. 

"You, Sir, I entertain you for one of my Hundred ; only, I do not like 
the fashion of your garments : you will say, they are Persian ; but let 
them be changed." — King Lear, Act IH. sc. 6. 

II. Well-saffroued. Saffron is an Arab word {zafara^i), and very small 
quantities of the herb are used in Persia as a spice. It has a strong, pun- 
gent taste. 

27. A'ishapur to Sebzevah. Nishaftir, or Nis/iapoor, is a city in the 
northeastern part of Persia, in the province of Khorassan. It has a spe- 
cial trade in turquoises, obtained from mines to the northwest. Sebzevah 
(more commonly Sabzawar, or Siibzairar) is a fortified town, sixty-five 
miles west of Nishapur. It has a good bazaar. It must not be confound- 
ed with Subzawur in Afghanistan, about a hundred miles south of Herat. 

35. Furslatte. A common plant with thick, siicculent leaves. 

Lupines. A large genus of the bean family. They are more used in 
Eastern countries than here as food for cattle. 

38. Doit. A small Dutch coin, worth about a quarter of a cent. Cf. 
Temp. ii. 2. 33 : " When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, 
they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian." 

41. Quoth that. That is, the other camel. 

43. Simooms. The hot winds so common and so destructive in the 
Arabian deserts. 

46. Chervil. Literally " pleasant leaf ;" another succulent plant. 

50. Heartened. Encouraged. Cf. 3 Henry VI. ii. 2, 79 : "And hearten 
those that fight in your defence." 

yj. A brand. A somewhat doubtful reward ! 

58. Good-and-faithful-servant. See Matt. xxv. 14 and Luke, xix. 12. 

64. Lilith. It was a belief of the Talmudists that Adam had a wife, 
Lilith, before he married Eve, and that the children of this first marriage 
were devils. In the demonology of the Middle Ages, Lilith is a popular 
witch. She appears in Goethe's Faust. Finally the name has become a 
generic one for any beautiful and beguiling woman. Browning has a 
poem in Dramatic Idylls (second series) called Adam, Lilith, and Eve. 
It is, however, a modernized version of the situation in Eden. 

89. Browning introduces several Hebrew lines in the Fancies. The 
transliteration and translation of this one are as follows : 

Hahinnam I yare 1 lyod " I Elohim. 

for naught | doth fear | Job | God. 

This passage is the last clause oi Job, i. 9. 

90. /// Persian phrase. It is a Persian who is speaking ; but there 
may be more in the expression than this. " The real learning of this pas- 



YOUTH AND ART. 173 

sage," says a clergyman deeply read in Jewish antiquity, "is not in its 
use of the Hebrew phrase, which is, indeed, a superficial pedantry, but in 
the natural, seemingly careless choice of the adjective Persian. That 
shows that Mr, Browning must be perfectly familiar with the immense 
literature of the controversy regarding the date and origin of the Book of 
Job. He might have said ' Hebrew phrase,' or ' Scripture plirase.' 
Either would have passed without challenge even from scholars. But he 
has reached the conclusion of the most skilful modern commentators that 
the Book of Job is a product of Persian civilization, and of much later 
date than has usually been supposed." 

95. The Hebrew word in this line bears excellent evidence of being a 
misprint for the first word of the preceding Hebrew quotation, with the 
addition of the prefix "min" or "from." No vowels are represented in 
the printing of Hebrew words, and the omission of a dot like that in the 
first word of 89 makes a serious difficulty in the interpretation of a word. 
But the sense here is doubtless " A proper speech were this from God ;" 
that is, from the Creator to the creature. For the ironical use oi proper, 
cf Shakespeare, Much Ado, iv. I. 312 : "A proper saying !" Macbeth, iv. 
4. 60 : " O proper stuff !" etc. 

104. At maiCs iiutifference. God is more likely to be displeased at 
man's indifiference to the beauties of the universe than at his absorption 
in them. 



YOUTH AND ART. 



The poem was published in Dramatis Persons in 1864. It is an excel- 
lent miniature illustration of Mr. Browning's deepest human feeling, — the 
desire that each soul should work out its own individuality, and so its 
own salvation, by every means in its power. The man who is the creat- 
ure of circumstance, of conventionality, who hesitates and trembles before 
his own impulses, is a contemptible creature in the eyes of the poet. The 
Statue and the Bust is a larger development of the same theme. To see 
a great, noble emotion within reach, and to sit in the arm-chair of conven- 
tionality while it passes by, is a crime v^'hose punishment will be eternal. 

" So ! while these wait the' trump of doom 
How do their spirits pass, I wonder, 
Nights and days in the narrow room? 

"Still, I suppose, they sit and ponder 
What a gift life was, ages ago, 
Six steps out of the chapel yonder. 

" Surely they see not God, I know, 
Nor all that chivalry of His, 
The soldier-saints who, row on row, 

" Burn upward each to his point of bliss— 
Since, the end of life being manifest, 
He had cut his way thro' the world to this^ * 



* The Statue and the Bust (in Men and Woinrn. p. 121). 



174 



NOTES. 



8. Gibson, John (1791-1866). A pupil of Canova and Thorwaldsen. 
His most famous sculpture is The Wounded Amazon. 

12. Grisi, Giulia (1810-1869). An Italian singer, the most famous of 
her time. 

58. Bals-pares. Dress balls. 

(Xi. R.A. Member of the Royal Academy of Art. 



SONG 

FROM "A BLOT IN THE 'sCUTCHEON." 

A Blot in the ''Saitcheon is the fourth in the series of Dramas, and was 
published in 1843. This song from it is so unique, not only among 
Browning's poems, but in the literature of our language, that we extract 
and insert it here, in violation of our principle that no mutilated poems 
shall appear in the book. 



MAY AND DEATH. 



Mrs. Orr says of this poem : " It was a personal utterance, provoked 
by the death of a relative whom Mr. Browning dearly loved," 

It first appeared in The Keepsake for 1857, edited by Miss Power. It 
was reprinted with some new readings in Dramatis Personce, 1864. 

8. Moon-births. The ist ed. has "Moon's birth." 

()-\o. So, for their sake, tic. The 1st ed. reads : 

" So, for their sake, prove May still May ! 
Let their new time, like mine of old," etc. 

15. Save a sole streak. The 1st ed. has " Except a streak." 
19. But I, etc. The ist ed. has " And I, — whene'er the plant is there," 
etc. 



MY STAR. 

With My Star we begin a series of five poems addressed at one time 
and another to Mrs. Browning. The first two were published during her 
life, the last three after her death. Browning has written many others 
under the same inspiration. These are selected as the most typical, if 
not the most beautiful. Curiously enough, two of them have been mis- 
taken by some critics for addresses to Christ. The blunder is not incon- 
ceivable in Prospice, but how one could so misinterpret the Invocation, 
"O lyric Love," is mysterious. However, Browning will wait long to 
suffer what Shakesj^eare has suffered at the hands of commentators. 

My Star was published in Men and Women in 1855. 

4. Like the angled s/^ar. Spar is a generic word applied to any mineral 
which breaks into regular surfaces, and reflects the light, or has, as we 
say, lustre. 



ONE WORD MORE. ly^ 

9. Dartles. A frequentative of (/izr/", probabl}' of the poet's own coin- 
age. It is not in Wore, or Wb. The Supplement of the Imp. Diet, gives 
it, with this passage as illustration. 

10. Like a bird. For Browning's poetic feeling for birds, see note on 
Pippa Passes, prol. 170. 

ONE WORD MORE. 

This poem concludes ATen and Women, the volume of short pieces pub- 
lished in 1855. There were fifty poems besides this. The warm, per- 
sonal feeling which Browning shows in it increases the interest which the 
beauty of the work alone would inspire. 

5. A century of sonnets. The name of the lady to whom these sonnets 
are addressed is not positively known. In fact, the whole story is wraj^ped 
in a romantic mist. According to the records of the Abate Melchior 
Missivini, she was Margarita, the daughter of a Roman baker. A small 
house in the Strada Santa Dorotea is still shown as her birthplace. The 
meeting of Raphael with her is described by the abate, and, if we may 
believe him, it was a full-fledged love from the first moment. 

Such of the sonnets as remain are scrawled on various sketches for the 
" Disputa" — the famous painting of the Vatican. One sketch with son- 
net is in the British Museum. The sonnet is, it must be confessed, poor 
enough poetry and most voluptuous sentiment. An interesting pamphlet 
on this treasure is '■'' Rafaello Sanzio. His Sonnet in the British Museum, 
Studied by Louis Fagan." The most complete transcript of the sonnets 
is in Grimm's Life ol Raphael. 

21. MadoniMs. Raphael painted no less than fifty. 

22. Her, San Sisto navies, and her, Foligno. The Madonna di San 
Sisto, or Sistine Madonna, so called from the representation of St. Six- 
tus with St. Barbara in the lower part of the picture, is in the Dresden 
Gallery. The Madonna di Foligno, now in the Vatican, was painted in 
1 5 12 for the church of Ara Coeli in Rome, but was removed in 1565 to 
Foligno, a view of which city appears in the backgrotmd of the picture. 

23. Her that visits F.'orejice in a vision. Probably the Madonna del 
Granduca, a work of Raphael's P'lorentine period, formerly in the palace 
of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, but now in the Pitti Gallery. Passavant, 
in his Life^ of Raphael, says of it : "The bold, commanding, and lumi- 
nous style in which the painting stands out from the background makes the 
figure and divine expression of the head still more im])ressive. Thanks 
to all these qualities united, this Madonna produces the effect of a super- 
natural apparition [the italics are ours]. In short, it is one of the master- 
pieces of Raphael." 

24. Her thafs left with lilies in the Louvre. Apparently the Madonna 
known as La Belle Jardijiiere, from the fact that the Virgin is represent- 
ed as seated in a garden, with lilies among the flowers of it. In the Ma- 
donna of Francis /., also in the Louvre, an angel is scattering flowers over 
the Mother and Child, but they do not seem to be lilies, though Grimm 
{I^ife of Raphael) or his translator calls them so. 

27. Guido Reni. Born in 1575. The book must, accordingly, have 



1^6 NOTES. 

come to him through the hands of some one who knew Raphael, as the 
latter died in 1520. 

33. Beatrice. Beatrice Portinari was the first and only love of Dante. 
Tradition says that he was but nine years old when he met her, and that 
he loved her faithfully during his whole life. About 1290 he wrote the 
Vita A^iiova, which embodies and commemorates his love for her. She 
died at twenty-four. So completely has Dante spiritualized and refined his 
passion, that recent critics begin to doubt that Beatrice was a real woman. 

35. A pen corroded. Dante in his Inferno immortalized many a Flor- 
entine by giving him a conspicuous place among the damned, lie has 
been charged with gratifying personal spite upon some of these unfortu- 
nate victims ; but Browning evidently thinks otherwise. 

38. Stigma. A brand, especially one of disgrace. 

57. Bice. A tender diminutive of Beatrice ; pronounced like beechy. 

73. Heave7i' s gift takes eartJi's abatement. Fame itself brings pain to the 
genius who gives his treasures reluctantly into the world's keeping. 

74. Smites the rock. Cf. Ntimb. xx. 

92. The ''ciistomed prehide. Three times, certainl}', before Moses smote 
the rock for water, he had delivered the Israelites from some dire dis- 
tress. Moses, however, is used here rather as a type of saviours than as 
an individual. 

95. Egypt's flesh-pots. Cf. Exod. xvi. 3. " Since the miracle gives us 
nothing better than water, we might better have suffered the drought, 
which gave us at least a warrant for murmuring." 

96. Sinai-forehead's. Browning uses with German freedom these awk- 
ward compounds. Cf. Exod. xxxiv. 29. 

98. Riiiht-arm's rod-sweep. Cf. yV/zw/'. xx. 1 1. 

loi. jethro's daughter. Zipporah, the wife of Moses. Cf. Exod. ii. 21, 
iii. I, iv. 18. 

III. All-express. Another Germanism. 

122. The liberal hand. Accustomed to the free, bold work of fresco- 
painting. 

125. Missal-marge. The margin of a prayer-book; in the olden time 
often exquisitely adorned with delicate painting. 

136. Karshish^ Cleon^ A^orbert. For the change from "Karshook" to 
Karshish., see introductory note on Ben Karshook' s Wisdom, p. 169, above. 
Karshish is the writer of An Epistle Containi?ig the Strange Medical 
Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician (in Men and Women, p. 65). 
Cieon is the hero of the poem of that name (Id. p ''02). Norbert is the 
hero of /« a Balcony {Id. p. 217). 

138. Lippo, Roland, or Andrea. Lippo is the painter in Era Lippo 
lippi (in Men and Women, p. 25). For Roland, see " Childe Roland to 
the Dark Tower Came.''' Andrea is Andrea del Sarto (in Men and Wot?ien, 
p. 184). 

145. Here in London, etc. The Brownings lived in Italy during most 
of their married life, only coming to London when forced to do so by 
business. 

148. Fi'esole. The town lies on the height to the north of Florence, 
and three miles awav. 



PROS PICE. 177 

150. Sammiitialo. The ancient Church of San Mi'niato, on the hill to 
the east of Florence, and very conspicuous from many points in the city. 
Samniiniato is the softened popular pronunciation of the name. 

158. Coicld love a mortal. As she loved Endymion. 

160. Mythos. The Greek word of which myth is a contraction. 

161. Turn ii new side^ etc. The moon always turns the same side to 
the earth. Of the other side we know nothing. 

163. Zoroaster. The probably mythical founder of the Persian religion, 
and compiler of the sacred books of the Zend-Avesta. The Persian wor- 
ship of light and heat made the sun and the moon the objects of their 
most solemn ceremonials. 

165. heats — him even. The chaste moon should reveal herself, if to 
any one, to the man who wrote The Eve of St. Agues, with its matchless 
pictures of moonlight. 

Browning has always a peculiar tone of tenderness and admiration for 
Shelley and Keats. They were his first loves among the poets. At thir- 
teen, he found some stray poems by Shelley, and was greatly stirred by 
them. He procured with difficulty all the rest of Shelley's works, and at 
the same time three small volumes of Keats. Neither of the poets was 
much read at the time. They undoubtedly had a large influence in de- 
termining the direction of Browning's activity. Cf. Memorabiiia (in Men 
and Women, p. 183) : 

"Ah. did you once see Shelley plain, 
And did he stop and speak to you?" 

170. Upon the ship it founders. Goddess loves have sometimes proved 
disastrous. 

171. Ctyslals. Some of the English editions print "chrystals;" but 
Browning, who lays so much stress on spelling Greek proper names in 
the Greek way, cannot be responsible for this obsolete orthography. 

174. Moses, Aaron, Nodal), and Abihu. See Exod. xxiv, 9 fol. : Then 
went up Moses, and Aaron, and Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the 
elders of Israel ; and they saw the God of Israel : and there was under 
bis feet as it were a paved work of a sapphire stone, and as it were the 
body of heaven in his clearness." The Revised Version has " As it were 
the very heaven for clearness." 

179. When they ate, etc. See Exod. \x\v. ii. 



PROSPICE. 

The title of the poem means simply " Look forward." It was first 
published in 1864 in Dratnatis Persona;. 

"A noble poem. P'ace the last fight with Death. Yours the Gain" 
(Furnivall). 

7. In a visible form. All the eds. put a comma after form, but the 
mark of interrogation is more in accordance with rule and usage, as the 
question proper ends here, though the connection of thought with what 
follows is very close. 

12 



178 



NOTES. 



27. O thou soul, etc. The poet never loses an opportunity for an ex- 
quisite allusion to the lost love. 



INVOCATION. 

This poem concludes "the Introduction to The Ring and the Book 
(1868-69). Furnivall points out that a certain Mr. George McCrie, in a 
work called The Religion of Our Literature, states that "Though ' Lyr- 
ic Love' is here a quality personified, it seems to be so interchangeably 
with Christ." It is the fashion among a certain class of sentimentalists 
to twist Browning's lines to his wife into addresses to Christ. But this is 
really an appalling irreverence (see first two lines). Perhaps, however, 
Mr. McCrie thinks that no one but Christ ever came to earth "To toil 
for man, to suffer, and to die." 

The Invocation, although an extract (see on Song, p. 174 above), is 
essentially a complete poem in itself. 

4. Took sanctuary, etc. To take sanctuary was the legal term for taking 
refuge in a sancttiary, or asylum in which a person was privileged from 
persecution or arrest. Cf. Shakespeare, Rich. III. iii. i. 27 : 

"The queen your mother and your brotlier York 
Have taken sanctuary;'' 

that is, in the Sanctuary at Westminster (within the precincts of the Ab- 
bey), which retained its privileges until the dissolution of the monastery. 
In the Comedy of Errors Antipholus of E])hesus takes refuge in the pri- 
ory, and the abbess refuses to give him up (v. i. 914) : 

"he took this place for sanctuar\' 
And it sliall privilege him from your hands." 

For a figurative use of the phrase, cf. Dryden (quoted in Imp. Diet.) : 
"The admirable works of painting were made fuel for the fire ; but some 
reliques of it took sanctuary under ground, and escaped the common des- 
tiny." 

7. When the first sjimmons, etc. Cf. Mrs. Browning, Sonnets from the 
Portuguese, vii. : 

"The face of all the world is changed, I think, 
Since first I heard the footsteps of thy soul 
Move still, oh, still, beside me ; as they stole 
Betwixt me and the dreadful outer brink 
Of obvious death, where I who thought to sink 
Was caught up into love and taught the whole 
Of life in a new rhythm." 

14. Who best taught song, etc. Cf. Sonnets from Portuguese, xvii. : 

" My poet, thou canst touch on all the notes 
God set between his After and Before, 
And strike up and strike off the general roar 
Of the rushing worlds a melody that floats 
in a serene air purely. Antidotes 
Of medicated music, answering for 
Mankinds forlornest uses, thou canst pour 



A WALL. 179 

From thence into their ears. God's will devotes 

Thine to such ends, and mine to wait on thine. 

How. Dearest, wilt thou have me for most use .' 

A hope, to sing by gladly? or a fine 

Sad memory, with thy songs to interfuse? 

A shade in which to sing— of palm or pine? 

A grave on which to rest from singing? Choose." 

16. Despite the distance and the dark. Q". Mrs. Browning, Vision oj 
Poets : 

" Let the b!oom 
Of Lite grow over, undenied, 
This bridge of Death, which is not wide " 

20. Never coticlude. The Ring and the Book has another allusion and 
dedication to " Lyric Love " in its last lines. The connection is too close 
to allow citation. 

23. So blessing back, etc. This is one of the most obscurely construct- 
ed passages in Browning. The difficulty lies in the peculiar use of '* bless- 
ing " with the adverb " back." The sense, however, of the whole passage 
from line 13 is this : "May I never begin my song without a j^rayer for 
thy inspiring presence, — never conclude that song without rendering 
thanks to that heaven to which eyes that can not reach yet yearn. So 
shall I send blessing in turn to that half-seen, half-dreamed whiteness in 
the heaven which may be thy face, that 'wanness where, I think, thy 
foot nuiv fall.' " 



A WALL. 

This poem, which the author entitles A Wall in the Selections from 
Robert Brozvniug''s Poems, Second Series, published in 1S80, was written 
and printed as the Prologue to Pacchiarotto and Hozv he Worked in Dis- 
temper, published in 1876. It is another expression of the poet's uncon- 
querable desire to pierce the darkness which separates earth from that 
life which is to come. We never understood the poem until we lived for 
a summer month in sight of a high, brick, windowless, vine-grown wall. 
The half-mysterious flutter of the foliage might stimulate a more sluggish 
imagination than that of Browning to fancy a subtle connection between 
vine without and soul within the wall. 

5. Lush. A curious word. It is a contraction v>{ hiscions, and a doub- 
let of lusty. Shakespeare {M. N. D. ii. i. 251) uses luscious in the sense 
of luxuriant in growth : " Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine " 
(where some editors substitute "lush"), and lush in combination with 
lusty in Temp. ii. i. 52 : " How lush and lusty the grass looks." Cf. also 
Tennyson, Dream of Fair Women, 71 : " through lush green grasses," etc. 

13. And there again! Recurring to \he pulsation of 9 above ; an excel- 
lent phrase for the subtle, indescribable thrill and quiver which runs 
through a mass of leaves. 

17. Wall upon wall are. A "construction according to sense" rather 
than syntax, which would require " is." 



i8o NOTES. 



PROEM TO DRAMATIC IDYLLS (SECOND SERIES). 

The second series oi Dramatic Idylls was published in 1880. 

Compare these lines with Hamlet, iii. 2. 339 fol. : " Why, look you now, 
how unworthy a thing you make of me ! You would play upon me ; you 
would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my 
mystery ; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my com- 
pass : and there is much music, excellent voice in this little organ ; yet 
cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think I am easier to be 
played on than a pipe ?" 

6. The lights. The organs of breathing. The word is properly ap- 
plied only to the lungs of brute animals. Of course its use here is a part 
of .the mockery of the passage. 



PIPPA PASSES. 

"The most simple and varied of Browning's plays — that which shows 
everv side of his genius, has most lightness and strength, and, all in all, 
may be termed a representative poem — is the beautiful drama with the 
quaint title of Pippa Passes. Ii is a cluster of four scenes, with pro- 
logue, epilogue, and interludes ; half prose, half poetry, varying with the 
refinement of the dialogue. Pippa is a delicately pure, good, blithesome 
peasant maid. * 'T is but a little black-eyed, pretty singing Felippa, gay 
silk-winding girl,' — though with token, ere the end, that she is child of a 
nobleman, put out of the way by a villain, Maffeo, at instigation of the 
next heir, Pippa knows nothing of this, but is piously content with her 
life of toil. It is New- Year's day at Asolo. She springs from bed, in her 
garret chamber, at sunrise, resolved to enjoy to the full her sole holi- 
day. She will not 'squander a wavelet' of it, not a 'mite of her twelve 
hours' treasure.' Others can be happy throughout the year: haughty 
Ottima and Sebald, the lovers on the hill ; Jules and Phene, the artist 
and his bride ; Luigi and his mother ; Monsignor, the Bishop ; but Pippa 
has only this one day to enjoy. She envies these great ones a little, but 
reflects that Gods love is best after all. And yet, how little can she do ! 
How can she possibly affect the world t Thus she muses, and goes out, 
singing, to her holiday and the sunshine. Now, it so happens that she 
passes, this day, each of the groups of persons we have named, at an im- 
portant crisis in their lives, and they hear her various carols as she trills 
them forth in the innocent gladness of her heart. Sebald and Ottima 
have murdered the latter's aged husband, and are unremorseful in their 
guilty love. Jules is the victim of a fraud practised by his rival artists, 
who have put in his way a young girl, a paid model, whom he believes 
to be a pure and cultured maiden. He has married her, and just discov- 
ered the imposture. Luigi is hesitating whether to join a patriotic con- 



PIPPA PASSES. i8i 

spiracy. Monsignor is tempted by Maffeo to overlook his late brother's 
murder, for the sake of the estates, and to utterly ruin Pip]>a. . . . 

" All these persons are vitally affected — have their lives changed — mere- 
ly by Pippa's weird and suggestive songs, coming, as if by accident, upon 
their hearing at the critical moment. With certain reservations this is a 
strong and delicate conception, admirably worked " (Stedman, Victorian 
Poets, p. 315 fol.)- 

It is most important, in order to judge the work of a poet with fairness 
or even with intelligence, that we should be able to measure him by his 
own standard. In plain English, we must know what he means to do. 
This seems so axiomatic as to be superfluous statement ; but much re- 
cent criticism fails to hit the mark, because it fails to distinguish between 
the artist's conception and the artist's execution. It is sheer nonsense 
to scold Emerson because he does not write like Milton, or condemn 
George Eliot because she has not the method of Fielding. 

The first question to be asked about Mr. Browning's dramas, then, is 
not " How do they compare with the dramas of Shakespeare .?" but rath- 
er " What is their conception ?" or, if we like, " How do they compare in 
conception with those of Shakespeare .'"' Let us concede at the outset 
that the mere passage of three hundred years will have a tendency to al- 
ter some of the forms which were thought fundamental in the Elizabeth- 
an drama. For example, it is true that Shakespeare makes all his per- 
sons speak in character. So excellent a critic as Mr. Stedman falls into 
the error of judging Browning's work by the standard of the old demand. 
He says of Pippa Passes, "The usual fault is present: the characters, 
whether students, peasants, or soldiers, all talk like sages ; Pippa rea- 
sons like a Paracelsus in pantalettes, — her intellectual songs are strange- 
ly put in the mouth of an ignorant, silk-winding girl ; Phene is more nat- 
ural, though mature even for Italy, at fourteen. Browning's children are 
old as himself; he rarely sees them objectively." Now the simple fact 
that Pippa does not speak in the least like a mill-girl is evident to the 
most cursory reader of ten lines of her opening soliloquy. Surely what 
one who runs may read cannot have escaped Mr. Browning's attention. 
He knows that there is no verisimilitude in his dramas. He lives in a 
world of plain men and women and he knows how they talk, as scores 
of his poems testify. It must be, then, that this departure from actual 
dialect is deliberate. Whether we like or approve it or not, here it is, 
to be accounted for. It may seem arrogance to attempt to explain the 
method of a living poet, but nothing else remains as reply to such a crit- 
icism. 

In his Essay on Shelley, Browning speaks of one class of poets as striv- 
ing towards " Not what man sees, but what God sees." This seems the 
key to the whole matter. Browning does not try to represent the facts 
of life as they appear to the man who is not a poet. That can be done 
in prose. If photography be the ultimate art, then we may as well be 
done at once with painting and sculpture. But, like the other fine arts, 
jjoetry is born to express that most difficult of expression — the inexpres- 
sible, as we say. So when Browning's great, full, rich soliloquy s])rings 
from the lips of the silk-winding girl, it aims to be simply the truest ex- 



i82 NOTES. 

pression of all the wild, free joys and quivering fears which press upon 
her heart unuttered. She is a dumb creature. In point of fact, she could 
not voice one of those million emotions. But poetry has come that the 
human heart may have speech. Like the gospel, it preaches liberty to 
the captive. The poet sees as God sees, and says as God might say. 

Once granting the poet's right to such a method, we shall be broader 
critics. It is by such a standard that Browning's claims judgment. 

Of course dramas constructed on this theory will not succeed on the 
stage. Mr. Browning's have not succeeded. The moment actual men and 
women begin to speak the words which the poet puts into their mouths, 
the discrepancy appears between their speech and their power of speech. 
There is a fatal confusion of two artistic methods. But let the lines tell 
their own story, in the closet, and Pippa and Ottima and Colombe and 
Gerald and Chiappino will become more real than any mere external 
verisimilitude could make them. For these creatures are learned, and 
recognized not by their clothes, but by their souls. 

The author's dedication of the drama is as follows: 

I DEDICATE 

MY BEST INTENTION'S, IN THIS POEM, MOST ADMIRINGLY TO THE 

AUTHOR OF *' ION," — 

MOST AFFECTIONATELY TO 

MR. SERGEANT TALFOURD. 

R. B. 

Asolo, the scene of the drama, is nineteen miles northwest of Treviso, 
and somewhat more than thirty miles from Venice. It is finely sit- 
uated on a hill, and is encircled by a wall flanked with towers. It has 
an old cathedral, and the ruins of a Roman aqueduct. Silk-growing and 
spinning are the chief industries of the region. In the country between 
Trent and Verona, 120,000 pounds of silk are annually produced. 

Prologue. — i. Day. The lengthening and hastening lines are de- 
scriptive of the rapid dawn. 

20. Asolo. The accent properly falls on the second syllable, but Brown- 
ing puts it on the first. Cf. 42 and 64 below. 

40. Feel. Used in Middle English in the sense of feeling, and collo- 
quially so now. 

45. Her Sebald''s homage. For the argument of the play, and summary 
of each episode, see the extract from Stedman's Victorian Poets above. 

62. Moiisignor. A bishop, as well as lord of his brother's estates. 

88. Martaxon. A ?.pedes o{ h\y {Li/ium martagou). 

89. St. Agues. She was a virgin martyr of the 4th century. She was 
remarkable for her beauty, and excited the admiration of all the noble 
youth of Rome ; but she resolved to live as the spouse of Christ, and at 
last died rather than give herself in marriage. She is kept in the mem- 
ory of the world of letters, if in no other way, by Keats's poem. The Eve 
of St. Agnes. Pippa has in mind some picture 'in the cathedral. 



PIPPA PASSES. 183 

94. Dusk green universe. The deptlis of ocean. Cf. "Swart green," 
ii. 51 below. 

100, Weevil and chafer. Small, destructive insects of the beetle family. 
The latter is more commonly called the cockchafer. 

102. Gibe. Flout. Cf. Shakespeare, /^. a«t/ C ii. 2. 74 : 

" and with taunts 
Did gibe my missive out of audience." 

120. Luca. The decrepit and hated husband of Ottima. 

131. Possagno church. Possagno was the birthplace of Canova, and 
the church was designed by him. It is in the form of a circular temple. 
It contains his tomb, and an altar-piece by him. As Possagno is but four 
miles from Asolo, and as the memory of Canova is worshipped in all the 
region, nothing could be more natural than that a wedding — especially 
that of an artist — should take place in that church, 

166. Our turret. Probably one of the ruined tow'ers of the old walls. 

169. Each to each. The mother and Luigi, not the lizards. 

170. As brooding bird to bird. Browning is especially happy in his ob- 
servation of birds. Cf. Home Thoughts from Abroad: 

"That 's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, 
Lest you should think he never could recapture 
The first, fine, careless rapture." 

Stedman says of that passage : " Having in mind Shakespeare and 
Shelley, I nevertheless think [these] lines the finest ever written touching 
the song of a bird." 

181. The Palace by the Dome. The cathedral {/hiomo or Dome) and 
its adjoining Bishop's Palace are in the centre of the town. 

197. More pain that this^ etc. The American ed. copies the English 
misprint of " than" for that. 

213. Cicala. Italian for cicada, a. genus of insects remarkable for the 
loud shrill sounds they make. 

Scene I. — "To my thinking, there is no grander passage in literature 
than that tremendous scene between Ottima and her paramour in Pippa 
Passes ; no one accuses the author of that, and of The Riug and the Book, 
of neglecting love or overlooking the body ; and yet I do daily homage 
to the genius of Robert Browning" (Robert Buchanan*). 

4. Your Rhineland nights. There is an especial dramatic purpose in 
making Sebald a German. The Italian temperament would not be capa- 
ble of so strong a reaction as he suffers. 

28. St. Mark^s. The cathedral at Venice, about thirty miles away. 
The belfry is the lofty campanile of the church, the highest tower in the 
city. It is a fact that Venice, Vicenza, and Padua can be seen from the 
hill of Asolo in clear weather. Vicenza is about twenty-five miles to the 
southwest, and Padua about the same distance directly south. 

45. His blood. Cf. Macbeth (ii. 2. 31) for another illustration of the 
effect of crime in forcing the mind to dwell upon so trivial a matter as 
mere words. 

* The Fleshly School of Poetry and Other Phetiomena 0/ the Day, by Robert Bu- 
chanan \Londoi), 1872). 



iS4 NOTES. 

54. Wiftnl. Properly, a 7unU7i_^ cuckold. Cf. Shakespeare, M. IV. jj. 
2.313: "Cuckold! wittol-cuckold ! the devil l)imself hath not such a 
name." 

56. Black ? The mere sight of the dark wine repels him with its sug- 
gestion of blood. 

58. Dnomo. The cathedral. See on prol. 181 above. 

59. Caf^uchm. A monk of the order of St. Francis. 

76. Proof-mark. The sign which shows a print to have been an early 
product of the press before the ]:)late is worn by repeated impressions. 

80. Coil. Ado, "fuss." Cf. Shakespeare, T.G.ofV.\.2.^<): "Here 
is a coil with protestation !" 

116. He is turned. There is a superstition that the face of a murdered 
man always looks skyward for vengeance. 

119. Four gray hairs. Ottima's age is probably greater than Sebald's. 
See 228 below. 

167. Campanula's chalice. A large genus of bell-shaped flowers (Lnt. 
campanula, little bell). 

185. S'lvift ran the searching tempest overhead. Cf. Browning's other 
description of a thunderstorm in The Ring and The Book {The Pope, 

' ' "I stood at Naples once, a night so dark 

I could have scarce conjectured there was earth 

Anywhere, sky or sea or world at all : 

But the nights black was burst through by a blaze — 

Thunder struck blow on blow, earth groaned and bore, 

Tiirough her whole length of mountain visible : 

There lay the dty thick and plain with spires. 

And. like a ghost disshrouded, white the sea." 

The later passage is usually regarded as the finer, and it has a tremen- 
dous ethical force in its connection. But nothing can be more wonderful 
as a leap of the imagination than 

'• Plunged and replunged his weapon at a venture." 

Interlude I. — In each scene, or true episode, of the drama, Pippa 
a])pears. Not only does she speak or sing in each, but her presence is 
subtly felt and her appearance expected throughout. But the interludes 
are partly by way of explanation and partly for contrast and relief. Three 
of them are in prose, and they are all in a much lower key than the body 
of the drama. 

9. Giovacchino. A poet whom these fellows rail at is sure to have 
some fine qualities. The situation so sneeringly depicted is simply that 
of honorable flight from a passion either unworthy or impossible. 

13. Trieste. At the head of the gulf of the same name — the north- 
western extremity of the Adriatic. 

14. BluPhocks. The only unredeemed villain whom Browning has cre- 
ated. See interlude ii. i below. 

18. yEscJilapins, an Epic, etc. All these gibes are directed against 
an honor too fine to enjoy any passion without regard to consequences. 
Giovacchino has undertaken to cure himself of love by the judicious 
course of running away. Forthwith he is ridiculed by these fellows for 
treating love as if it were a disease, instead of enjoying it boldly, be it 



PIPPA PASSES. 185 

worthy or unworthy. They suggest that his epic shall have for its hero 
^^^sculapius, the god of medicine, and that various divinities be called in 
to assist in the cure of the lovesick victim. 

27. Et canibus nostris. And to our dogs. The quotation is from 
Virgil, Ed. iii. 67 : " Notior ut jam sit canibus non Delia nosiris." 

33. /;/ a tale. Bound to tell one story. Cf Shakespeare, Much Ado, 
iv, 2. 28 : " Fore God, they are both in a tale." 

39. Alone. That is, without the new bride. 

^6. Cancaid' s women. See on prol. 131 above. 

85. Pdche-fanchilla. Canova's Psyche {Psiche) was first placed in the 
Residenz at Munich, and afterwards moved to the gallery at Possagno. 
Fanchilla is Italian for young girl. 

89. Pieth. Shortly before Canova's death he worked a colossal mar- 
ble statue of Religion, and a Pieta (the Mother with the dead Christ in 
her arms) for the church in Possagno. 

106. Malamocco. A small town on the long sandy island of the same 
name (also known as the Lido^ which forms part of the boundary of the 
harbor of Venice. 

107. Alciphron. A Greek epistolary writer, supposed to have lived 
about 200 A.D. He represented social customs of various sorts in ficti- 
tious letters, the style of which is admired as of Attic purity. 

III. Lire. Plural oi lira, the Italian equivalent of the Y x twch fraric, 
and=i8.6 cents in our money. 

113. Tydeus. A Homeric hero who led an expedition against Thebes. 
He killed his arch-enemy, Melanippus, but was himself fatally wounded. 
As he lay on the ground^ Athena appeared to him with a divine remedy, 
which was to heal his wound, and also make him immortal. But Am- 
phiaraus cut off the head of Melanippus, brought it to him, and Tydeus 
ate the brain. This so disgusted Athena that she did not apply the rem- 
edy, and Tydeus died, the victim of his own hate. 

Academy. The Academy of Fine Arts at Venice. 

116. Fenice. Phenix ; the name of the leading theatre in Venice. 

135. Hannibal Sci'atchy. A burlesque of the name of the famous Ital- 
ian painter, Annibale Caracci. 

150. The little girl. Pippa. 

Scene II. — 26. Psyche's robe. Psyche (the soul) was the daughter of 
a king. She was hated by Venus, but loved by Cupid. He at last made 
her his wife, after having gained for her immortality. 

39. Minion. A favorite. Cf Shakespeare, Cymb. ii. 3. 39 : 

" The exile of her minion is too new : 
She hath not yet forgot him." 

Coluthns. One of the late Greek epic poets of the 6th century. Most 
of his works are lost, but a poem on " The Rape of Helen " was discov- 
ered by Bessarion in Calabria. 

40. Bistre. A dark-brown paint, made from the soot of wood. 
Bessarion' s scribe. John Bessarion (1395-1472) was a learned Greek 

cardinal. He was noted for his accurate and elegant scholarship, and 
his enthusiasm for Greek learning. 



1 86 NOTES. 

46. He said, etc. Odyssey, xxii. 10. Antinoiis was one of the suitors 
f>f Penelope. He attempted, in the absence of Ulysses, to dispose of 
Telemachus, and make himself master of the kingdom. Homer relates 
in the twenty-second book of the Odyssey how Ulysses on bis return 
treated the aspirants. The first to meet his fate was Antinoiis, who fell 
l)ierced in the neck by the "bitter shaft." 

50. Aijfiaixn Kaiser. German Emperor. 

51. Swaii-greeit. Dark green. Swart is rarely if ever used, even by 
early writers, to qualify another adjective of color. It means literally 
black. Tennyson had the compound " black-green " in the first version 
oi Recoil, of Arab. Nights: "Black-green the garden bovvers and grots" 
(now "Black the garden," etc.). 

Triaitheon. A short staff, emblem of high office. Cf. Hatnlet, i. 2. 
204: "Within his truncheon's length." 

54. Hippolyta. Queen of the Amazons. 

59. Tliuiider-free. The laurel, or hay, was anciently supposed to be a 
protection against lightning. The Emperor Tiberius, according to Sue- 
tonius, never failed to wear a wreath of it when the sky threatened a thun- 
derstorm. Cf. C/iilde Harold, iv. 41 : 

" For the true laurel-wreath which Glory weaves 
Is of the tree no bolt of thunder cleaves." 

61. Praise those who slew Hipparchus. Hipparchus was the son of 
Pisistratus, tyrant of Athens, and was slain by Harmodius and Aristogei- 
ton, B.C. 514. Their deed formed a favorite subject of drinking-songs, 
of which the most famous and popular is preserved in full by Athenaeus. 
It begins thus (Denman's translation) : 

" I '11 wreathe my sword in myrtle-bough, 
The sword that laid the tyrant low, 
When patriots, burning to be free, 
To Athens gave equality." 

The daggers with which the tyrant was killed were concealed in the 
myrtle-branches borne by the assassins at the festival of the Panathe- 
nsea. Cf. Childe Harold, iii. 20 : 

"all that most endears 
Glory is when the myrtle wreathes a sword 
Such as Harmodius drew on Athens' tyrant lord." 

75. Parsley croivns. The leaves of a species of parsley {Apiuin grave- 
olens, our celery) were much used by the ancients in garlands on account 
of their strong fragrance, especially in drinking-bouts. 

90. Beewise. Like a bee as it poises over a flower. The word is in 
none of the dictionaries, and is probably of Browning's coinage. 

92. Dryad. A nymph of the woods. 

95. Chalk. That is, crayon. 

98. Steel. The tool of the engraver. 

108. Not flesh. Flesh is in the same construction as metal in 106. 
The whole passage may be roughly paraphrased: "The capabiliiies 
of marble are numberless ; it may have the clearness of air, the brill- 
iancy of diamond ; it is at one moment metal, and at another, flesh ; 



PIPPA PASSES. 187 

it is even flame-like when the passion of the workman wakes an answer- 
ing passion." 

117. Tush. The use of this word alone would suffice to break the 
charm, 

181. I am a painter^ etc. The verses composed to reveal the hellish 
])lot are, as Lutwyche says, "slow, involved, mystical." The plain 
thought in them is that he has planned to make his hate most effective by 
striking at Jules through his love. Jules has married Phene believing her 
to have great personal beauty, a pure and childlike heart, and a strong 
intellect. The letters have been cunningly contrived to make the decep- 
tion complete. Now these verses, as they come brokenly from Phene's 
lips, reveal to him that his wife is removed bv every experience of her 
life from his dream of her. Her beauty remains ; but her mind has nev- 
er existed, and her purity has been ruined by the hideous schemes of 
Natalia and Lutwyche. 

253. Give her but the least excuse to love ?Jie. Perhaps the best com- 
mentary on this song would be the lines of Berington — so inferior poet- 
ically, and yet having that simplicity which gives value to a commentary : 

" 'T is verj' hard to give no gift. 
To yearn and yet to bide." 

But cf. 275 fol. below for the condensed sentiment of the song. 

257. 7o eternally reprme. This separation of the to of the infinitive 
from the verb is condemned by the grammars, but has the sanction of 
many good writers. 

266. All this. Queenship. 

270. yesses. Straps of leather or silk, fitted round the legs of a hawk, 
to which the line held in the falconer's hand is attached. Cf. Othello, 

' ^' ' "Though her jesses were my dear heart-strings, 

I 'd whistle her off and let her down the wind, 
To prey at fortune." 

272. The Cornaro. The old castle at Asolo, built in the 13th century, 
was the residence of Caterina Cornaro, the last queen of Cyprus, after siie 
resigned her kingdom to the Venetians in 1489. 

276. The grace of her. Her favor. Cf. Shakes]:)eare, M.for M. iv, 3. 

4 * "And you shall have your bosom on this wretch, 

Grace of the duke, revenges to your heart, 
And general honours." 

290. The visionary butterfly. The symbol of the soul, and naturally 
of immortality. 

306. Henceforth. From that time. The use with a past tense is pe- 
culiar. 

Ancona. A city on the east coast of Italy, the capital of a province of 
the same name. It is beautiful for situation, and the region roundabout 
is among the loveliest in Italy. 

318. To bei^in art afresh. Cf. iv. 45 fol. below. 

Interlude II. — r. Bluphocks. The foot-note on this name is appar- 
ently Browning's half-apology for creating a character of so unmixed evil 



1 88 NOTES. 

We supposed there could be but one interpretation of this character, 
and of the remarkable foot-note which concerns it. But we find ourselves 
at issue with Miss E. D. West in her understanding of the passage. She 
says (" One Aspect of Browning's Villains," Browning Society Papersy 
Part IV. p. 430) : 

" The vagabond Bluphocks is shown to us rather as a tool in the hands 
of a wicked man, than as a villain prompted by any evil motives of his 
own. No moral sense in him appears to be awake. The broad fact of 
this world being patent before him, that the sun does ' rise on the evil and 
the good, and the rain fall on the just and the unjust,' he feels no need 
to concern himself with any differences between them. Knocking about 
in the world, he must make a livelihood somehow ; he is as ?/;/moral as 
a professional London thief might be. His pocket full of zwanzigers, the 
payment given by the Intendant of the Bishop, for the innocent Pippa's 
intended ruin, are [is] to Bluphocks not the price of blood, but simply 
zwanzigers, — coins which will keep him afloat, and in the ease of care- 
lessness as long as they last ; and then some other like bit of lucky 
chance may come to him." 

Surely the foot-note cannot be intended as the key to Bluphocks's inner 
character, but as a plea for our tolerance of him in the drama. It is not 
what he thinks of us which Browning needs tell us, but what we are to 
think of him. Miss West believes that to be ?///moral is better than to 
be /wmoral. But human nature disagrees with her. Nothing is more 
revolting to the world — which does not itself pretend to over-much mo- 
rality — than some creature with no apparent sense of obligation. This 
demand expresses itself in such proverbs as "There's honour even 
among thieves." Now Bluphocks has not even one fluttering shred of 
honor. He may not be malicious, but if not, it is because malignity is 
too much trouble. To expect from him one spark of compassion would 
be to expect fire from water. The Intendant, whom Miss West thinks 
the type of the unmitigated villain, at least spared the life of Pippa when 
her father ordered her murdered. 

We are content to give Bluphocks place as Browning's one embodi- 
ment of pure intellectual knavery. He is, as the Intendant confesses, "a 
handsome scoundrel." Even on such, Browning reminds us, God mak- 
eih his sun to rise and his rain to fall. 

2. Jntendanfs money. The bribe of Maff'eo, the superintendent in 
charge of the estate which the Bishop has just inherited from his brother. 
As will presently appear, Maffeo plots to put Pippa out of the way. He 
expects to find the new master as ready to his villainous purpose as the 
old has been. It may be well to explain, here, that Pippa is really heir- 
ess of the estate. 

8. Grig. A cricket; a common metaphor for incessant activity. Cf. 
Tennyson, The Brouk, 54: " Iligh-elbowed grigs that leap in summer 
grass." It is worth notice that the phrase " As merry as a grig " is a 
corruption of " As merry as a Greek." 

10. Armenian. The Armenian Church separated itself from the Ro- 
man Church in 491. It has a pope (Catholicos) to whose palace every 
Armenian must make a pilgrimage once in his life. The Armenians be- 
lieve in the worship of the saints, but not in purgatory. They are especial- 



PIPPA PASSES. 189 

]y rigid in the observance of fasts. Perhaps that is the reason Bluphocks 
admires them so much. 

II. Koenigsberg. A city of Eastern Prussia, the third in size in the 
dominion. 

Prussia Improper. The arm of land bounded on the north by the Bal- 
tic and on the south by Poland was long called " Prussia Proper," to dis- 
tinguish it from the other provinces of the kingdom. Koenigsberg is just 
over the boundary of Brandenburg. 

14. Chaldee. A Semitic dialect, in which parts of the books oi Daniel 
and Ezra were written. 

19. Syriac. The common language of Western Asia from the third to 
the eighth century. By the nineteenth century it had disappeared, except 
as the ecclesiastical language in the Syrian churches. 

20. Vowels. The Syriac has five vowels denoted by the Greek vowels 
inverted. Bluphocks would be likely to remember those after he had 
forgotten the more difficult consonants. 

21. Celareitt, Darii, Ferio. "Barbara, Celarent, Darii, Ferioque, pri- 
ons," is the first of five mnemonic lines used by logicians to designate 
the nineteen valid forms of the syllogism. 

23. Posy. A verse of poetry, a motto. The word is a contraction of 
"poesy." Its sense of "flower" or "nosegay" is derived from the fact 
that flowers were often used symbolically, as they still are in the East. 
Cf. Tract 1422 of Heber's MSS., called "A New Yeares Guifte, or a 
posie made upon certain flowers presented to the Countess of Pembroke." 
For the sense in which it is here used, cf. Shakespeare, M. of V. v. i. 148 : 

" A paltry ring 
That she did give me, whose posy was 
For all tlie world like cutler's poetry 
Upon a knife.'' 

25. Hoctis-pocnssed. Juggled. The derivations usually given to explain 
this word are absurd. It is simply the invention of the player of tricks. 

Fly and locust. Cf. Exod. viii. 20 and x. 4. 

Ho7v to yonah, etc. Cf. Jo7iah, i. This rhyme is a perfunctory one, 
since the Lord specifically wished Jonah not to go to Tarshish, and to 
go to Nineveh. 

27. How the angel, etc. Cf. Numb. xxii. 22 foj. 

31. Bishop Beveridge. The pun upon the name is evident. Bishop 
Beveridge ( 1636- 1707 ) was a most exemplary, benevolent, and self- 
denying divine. He was a voluminous author, and an ardent Calvinist. 

'}^'}^. Charon's wherry. Charon, son of Erebus, carried the shades of 
the dead in his boat across the river Styx (the Stygian ferry of 37 below) 
in the low^er world. For this he was paid with an obohts (a small Athe- 
nian coin), placed in the mouth of the corpse before burial. 

34. Ljipine-seed. A kind of pulse, an excellent food for an abstemious 
man, — hardly suitable for Bluphocks. 

Hecate's supper. Hecate was a goddess of terrible appearance, and of 
multiple powers. She was much feared, and was thought to be propiti- 
ated by frequent gifts of food, put at the cross-roads. 

37. Zwajtzigers. An Austrian silver coin, of twenty kreutzers, or about 
fifteen cents. 



igo NOTES. 

46. Prince Metternich. A celebrated Austrian statesman (i 773-1859). 
He was prime-minister from 1809 to 1848. This period includes the most 
stormy years of the reign of Napoleon. Metternich was a conservative, 
and a repressor. His policy was to keep down the various nationalities 
of the Austrian empire by means of each other. To him is attributed 
the saying " Apres moi, le deluge !" Revolution broke out at Vienna in 
1848. One of the first acts of the mob was to sack Metternich's palace. 
He fled to England, and never returned to public life. 

48. Draughts. The game popularly known as " checkers." 

53. Painirge constdts Hertrippa. Panurge is one of the important per- 
sonages in the romance oi Gargantua ami Pantagrtiel^ by Rabelais (1483- 
1553). Panurge is a handsome, dashing, witty young man whom Pan- 
tagruel befriends and finally makes his chief adviser. He is full of all 
manner of drolleries, and especially delights in practical jokes. Panurge 
resolves upon marriage, and consults various people concerning the step. 
He wishes to know if it will be fortunate, and also wishes advice about 
the candidate for his affections. All the authorities discourage him. At 
last he goes to Hertrippa, philosopher, magician, and physician. Here 
he receives the most alarming predictions. For further details see Wal- 
ter Besant's excellent book on Rabelais.* 

King Agrippa. Cf. Acts, xxvi. 27. 

55. Your head and a ripe musk-melon. The head being jocosely reck- 
oned as worth nothing. For the turn of expression, cf. Shakespeare, M. 
N. D. V. I. 293 : "This passion [the lament of Bottom as Pyramus over 
the slain ThisbeJ and the death of a dear friend would go near to make 
a man look sad." There is an old English proverbial saying in the same 
vein: "He that loseth his wife and sixpence hath lost a tester" (the 
tester being sixpence). 

61. That English fooVs, etc. There is no danger that the object of 
their watch may escape, as they gossip. 

71. Visa. An endorsement made by the police upon a passport sub- 
mitted to them for inspection, and found to be correct. //(f/^Wr^ depos- 
ited ; the etymological sense, now obsolete. 

75. Carbonari. A secret organization which was trying at this time to 
liberate Italy from Austria's grasp. See on iii. 18 below. 

76. Spielberg. A terrible Austrian prison, originally the citadel of 
Brunn in Moravia. 

84. Makes the signal. Bluphocks is to point out Luigi to the police. 

Scene HI. — 6. Lucius Junius. Lucius Junius Brutus was leader of the 
revolt which drove the Tarquins from Rome, and founded the republic 
(509 B.C.). Cf. y. C. \. 2. 158. His name comes naturally to Luigi's lips, 
as he tries the echo, for he is meditating a deed similar to that which made 
Brutus immortal. 

14. Old Franz. The Austrian emperor, Francis I. The early reading 
was " the scarlet comb ; now hark — " 

16. Lethim,e\.c. She refers, of course, to the tyrant whom Luigi is to kill. 

* Foreign Classics for English Readers. Rabelais, by Walter Besaiit (Edinburgh, 
1879). 



PIFPA PASSES. 191 

19. Pdlicos. Silvio Pellico (1788-1854) was one of the Italian patri- 
ots who tried to free his country from the yoke of Austria. He was a 
member of the secret society of the Carbonari, was arrested as such, and 
confined eleven years in the prisons of Santa Margherita in Milan, of I 
Piombi at Venice, and finally of Spielberg. His famous work, Zt' Mie 
Prigiotii, gives a most pathetic account of these years. At last, in 1830, 
he was set at liberty, and passed the rest of his life peacefully in literary 
pursuits. 

30. They visit nii^ht i>y night. In dreams. This justifies the mother's 
hint that his mind is touched. 

51. Cicala. See on prol. 213. 

55. I go this evening. Cf. interlude ii. 69 fol. Of course the police 
have been misinformed. 

99. Coppice. A copse, or wood of small growth. 

115. Blah. To tell tales. Cf. V. and A. 126: "These blue-veined 
violets whereon we lean can never blab." 

122. Andrea, Pier, Gnaltier. Former conspirators against the Austri- 
an tyranny. 

135. H 07V first the Anstrians got these provinces. In the summer of 
1813 the Austrian armies gained the greater part of northern Italy. The 
Congress of Vienna made one concession after another (this is the treaty 
of 138 below), untii in 1815 all the provinces were under the control of 
Austria. 

148. "■' I am the btight and morning-star.'''' Cf. Rev. xxii. 16. 

150. The gift of the viorning-star. Cf. Rtv. ii. 28. 

151. Chiara. Luigi's betrothed. 

156. Leading his revel. It is certainly rare to find June personified as 
masculine. For the changes the author has made here and elsewhere in 
the drama, see Addenda below. 

163. The Titian at Treviso. There is an altar-piece by Titian in the 
Annunziata chapel of the Cathedral at Treviso. 

164. A king lived long ago. This song was published in 1835. Six 
lines were added, and others altered when it was incorporated in Pippa 
Passes in 1841. Still other changes have since been made. 

168. Disparting. An intensive form oi parting. 

174. Bane. The ed. of 1835 has : "Age with its pine," 

172. Got to a sleepy mood. Got is here used in its frequent sense of be- 
gotten. 

175. The gods so loi>ed him. The ed. of 1835 has: "As though gods 
loved him." 

177. The king. The ed. of 1835 has "that he." 

184. Haled. Hauled, dragged. Cf. Luke, xii. 58, Acts, viii. 3. The ed. 
of 1835 has "some" for rough in 187. 

189. And sometimes clung, etc. The four following lines were inserted 
in 1841. This line then read " Sometimes there clung about his feet." 
The present version appears first in Moxon's Selections from Browning, 
1865, 

193. And sotnetimes from. The ist and 2d versions have " Sometimes 
from out." 



192 



NOTES. 



19^. C/iink. The ed of 1835 has "nook." 

196. On kuees. The ed. of 1835 omits On. 

198. At last there. The ed. of 1835 has " He was." 

205. His councillors. The ed. of 1835 has "Old " for His. 

209. A Python. Originally used only of the famous dragon which 
guarded the oracle of Delphi. He lived in the caves of Mt. Parnassu<, 
but was killed by Apollo, who then took possession of the oracle. Now 
the word is applied to any violent, graceless tyrant. 

The ed. of 1835 has : 

" A python swept the streets one day, 
The silent streets— until he came, 
With forky tongue and eyes of flame, 
Where the old king judged alvvay. 
But when he saw the silver hair 
Gift with a crown of berries rare. 
That the god will hardly give to wear." 

The ed. of 1841 has two variations from the version of 1835 : 

"A python passed one day 
The silent streets," 

and in the last line, 

"The god will hardly give to wear." 
The ed of. 1863 has the version given in our text. 
215. Which the god, etc. The version of 1835 has : 

"But which the God's self granted him 
For setting free each felon limb 
Faded because of murder done. 
Seeing this he did not dare 
Assault the old king smiling there." 

The version of 1841 has : 

(i) "But which the god's self granted him 

(2) For setting free each felon limb 

(3) Because of earthly murder done 

(4) Faded till other hope was none. — 

(5) Seeing this he did not dare 

(6) Approach that threshold in the sun, 

(7) Assault the old king smiling there." 

The version of 1863 cuts out Is. 1-4 of the 1841 edition, and for Is. 5-7 has: 

"Beholding this he did not dare 
Approach that threshold in the sun, 
Assault the old king smiling there. 
Such grace had kings when the world begun." 

The 23resent version from 215 to 218 appears first in Moxon's Selections^ 
1865. 

INTERT.UDE IH. — 7. Fig-peckers. A species of bird which lives upon 
figs. 

8. Lampreys. An eel-like fish, formerly thought a great delicacy, and 
still eaten in Europe. 

Bregavze-wine. Breganza is a village twelve miles north of Vicenza, 
noted for its wine. 

19. Deiizans. A variety of apple. 



PIPPA PASSES. 



193 



yuneiings. An early apple. Cf. Bacon, Essay 46^ On Gardens: "In 
July come . . . plummes in fruit, ginnitings, quadlins." The word is of- 
ten thought to be derived from the name of the month, but it is not so. 

Leather-coat. An apple with a tough skin. The name is generally ap- 
plied to the golden russet. Cf. Shakespeare, 2 Henry IV. v. 3. 44 : '* There 's 
a dish of leather-coats for you." 

55. Ortolans. A singing bird, about the size of the lark. It is found 
in Europe, and esteemed a delicious food. Browning evidently appre- 
ciates them. Cf. Prologue to FerishtaJi's Fancies : 

•' Pray, reader, have you eaten ortolans 

Ever in Italy? 
. Recall how cooks there cook them : for my plan 's 

To — Lyre with Spit ally. 
They pluck the birds,— some dozen luscious lumps, 

Or more or fewer, — 
Then roast them, heads by heads and rumps by rumps, 

Stuck on a skewer. 
But first.— and here 's tlie point I fain would press, — 

Don't think I 'm tattling ! — 
They interpose, to curb its lusciousness, — 

What 'twixt each fatling? 
First comes plain bread, crisp, brown, a toasted square * 

Then, a strong sage-leaf: 
<So we find books with flowers dried here and there 

Lest leaf engage leaf ) 
First, food — then, piquancy— and last of all 

Follows the thirdling: 
Through wholesome hard, sharp soft, your tooth must bite 

Ere reach the birdling. 
Now, were there only crust to crunch, you 'd wince: 

Unpalatable ! 
Sage-leaf is bitter-pungent — so 's a quince : 

Eat each who 's able ! 
But through all three bite boldly — lo, the gust! 

Flavor — no fixture — 
Flies permeating flesh and leaf and crust 

In fine admixture. 
So with your meal, my poem: masticate 

Sense, sight, and song there! 
Digest these, and I praise your peptics' state. 

Nothing found \\Tong there. 
Whence springs my illustration who can tell? — 

The more surprising 
That here eggs, milk, cheese, fruit suffice so well 

For gormandizing. 
A fancy-freak by contrast born of thee, 

Delightful Gressoney ! 
Who laughest 'Take what is, trust what may be!' 

That's Life's true lesson,— eh?" 

57. Polenta. A pudding, made in Italy of corn-meal, like the New 
England " hasty pudding." 

Scene IV. — 8. Messina. A large seaport town of Sicily. It has a 
very interesting cathedral and numerous other fine buildings. The cli- 
mate is delightful, though hot in August, as the bishop here intimates. 

9. Assjitnption Day. Assumption is a festival of the Church celebrated 

13 



194 NOTES. 

on the 15th of August in honor of the miraculous ascent of the Virgin 
Mary into heaven. It rests upon a traditional account of the ascent first 
recorded by Gregory of Tours. 

16. Ascoit, Fernio, and Fossiinibriino. These towns are all in the so- 
called "Marches" of Central Italy. Ascoli is on the Tronto, and Fos- 
sombruno on the Metauro. They are all important ecclesiastical centres. 
35. Jules, a foreign sculptor. Cf. scene ii. above. 

42. The very perfection. Cf. Andrea del Sarto (called ''The Faultless 
Painter ") : * 

" Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, 
Or what's a heaven for? All is silver-gray 
Placid and perfect with my art — the worse!" 

50. Correggio. Antonio Allegri da Correggio (1494-1534) is admired by 
the world of artists chiefly for his beautiful frescoes in the church of San 
Giovanni and those on the dome of the cathedral at Parma ; but the pop- 
ular taste delights in his " Reading Magdalen," his " Notte " (Night), 
and the Gypsy Madonna or '' Zingarella." 

71. Podere. Italian for a farm or small landed property. 

78. / 7vould better not. The early eds. have the good old English form 
"had better," to which the poet has since taken a dislike. In a letter, 
dated Oct. 25, 1885, quoted by Mrs. Orr (p. 14, foot-note), he says: 
" As regards the slovenly / had for / W, instead cjf the proper / 7uou/d, 
I shall not venture to supplement what Landor has magisterially spoken 
on the subject. An adverb adds to, and does not, by its omission, alter 
into nonsense the verb it qualifies. 'I would rather speak than be silent, 
better criticise than learn,' are forms structurally regular ; what meaning 
is in ' I had speak, had criticise ?' " This is essentially the faniiliar gram- 
mar-monger's objection to had better, had rather, had as lief, etc., that 
they "cannot be parsed" — which is true of many another well-established 
idiom, and merely shows that the " parsers " have something yet to learn. 
Browning apparently clings to the exploded notion that / had better had 
its origin in a blundering expansion of / W better, contracted from / luould 
better. The fact is that had better, etc., were the otily forms in use until 
the last century or so. They are the only ones in Shakespeare, Milton, 
and our English Bible. If one chooses to use the neologisms would bet- 
ter, etc., lethim do so, but not turn up his hyper-syntactical nose at those 
who prefer the older forms. 

80. Forli. A walled city q£ Italy, about forty miles to the southeast 
of Bologna. 

82. Cesena. A small town about twelve miles from Forli. It has a 
cathedral and a Capuchin church. 

lOl. Soldo. The Italian copper "penny," or ten-centesimi piece; in 
derivation as in value the equivalent of the French sou. 

105. Millet-cake. A cake made of a small grain which grows in Italy, 
and is eaten only by the poorest classes. 

no. Poderi. The plural oi podere. The early eds. have 'fodcresj' 
126. Moital sin. Deadly sin, or that which purgatory cannot remove. 
176. Begun operations already. Cf. interlude ii. p. 134 above. 

* Men atid Women, p. 184. 



ADDENDA. 



195 



T98. The seven and one. "The Seven Stars" is a popular synonym 
for the Pleiades, to which there is probably an allusion here. The one 
may be any "bright particular star" in the heavens. 

208. Miserere inei, Dotnine. " Be merciful to me, O Lord." 

Epilogue. — 2. Dray. Nest ; usually applied to that of the squirrel. 

5. The hedge • shrew is a field-mouse. The lob-worm resembles an 
earth-worm, but is larger. 

88. Mavis, merle , and throstle. The ;«<7Z7> (the English "song-thrush") 
and the throstle both belong to the thrush family. The merle (or merl) 
is the English blackbird. 

91. Howlet. Another form of oivlet. It is the spelling oi the early 
eds. in Macbeth, iv. i. 17 : " Lizard's leg and howlet's wing " — the only in- 
stance of the word in Shakespeare. 

92. Chantry. A private chapel, especially one endowed for the sing- 
ing of special mass for the souls of the dead. Cf. Henry V. iv. 1.318; 

" and I have built 
Two chantries, where the sad and solemn priests 
Sing still for Richard's soul." 
94. Fidl complines. The compline is the last division of the Roman 
Catholic breviary, and it is often customary to recite it after sunset. 

96. Co'ivls ajid twats. Twats is in no dictionary. We now have it from 
the poet (through Dr. Furnivall) that he got the word from the Royalist 
rhymes entitled "Vanity of Vanities," on Sir Harry Vane's picture, 
Vane is charged with being a Jesuit. 

" 'Tis said they will give him a cardinal's hat : 
They sooner will give him an old nun's twat." 
"The word struck me," says Browning, "as a distinctive part of a nun''s 
attire that might fitly pair off with the cowl appropriated to a monk," 



ADDENDA. 

A Few Notes from iMr. Browning. — Just as the book is going to 
press we receive a letter from Mr. Browning, dated July 10, 1886, which 
answers a few questions we ventured to send him through Dr. Furnivall. 

In Herve Riel, we could get no information about Damfreville, and 
were puzzled as to his relation to Toiirville, who was admiral of the fieet. 
Mr. Browning says : " Damfreville commanded the squadron that escaped, 
and his was the big ship presenting the greatest difficulty." 

In The Bishop Orders his Tomb, etc., our explanation of 95 (see p. 167 
above) is confirmed by the poet thus : " In St. Fraxed, the blunder as to 
' the sermon ' is the result of the dying man's haziness ; he would not re- 
veal himself as he does but for that." 

In the Tvo Camels, our impression that there must be a misprint in the 
Hebrew of 95 (see p. 173) is also confirmed.* Mr. Browning says : " The 
* yod ' is omitted by the printer's fault, as is shown by the correct retention 
of the letter in the line a little above: it means 'from God.' " 



w 



The error will be corrected before printing the text. This should be borne in mind 
1 reading the note on p. 173, which we leave as first written. 



196 NOTES. 

In One Word More, our question concerning the Madonnas referredto 
in 23 and 24 is answered thus: "The Madonna at Florence is that called 
' del Granduca,' which represents her as ' appearing to a votary in a vis- 
ion ' — so say the describers : it is in the earlier manner, and very beautiful. 
I think I meant 'La Belle Jardiniere' — but am not sure — for the picture 
in the Louvre." 

"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came." — The following 
early readings in this poem should be noted : 

52. For O'er the early eds, have " To." 

65. 'Tis the Last Jiuigmenfs fire, etc. " The Judgment's fire alone can 
cure this place." 

79. For aright I know. " For all I know." 

168. Clearer case. " Plainer case." 

179. Dotard, a-dozing. " Fool, to be dozing." 

A few verbal notes may also be added: 

114. Bespate. Bespattered; a word not in the dictionaries, and prob- 
ably coined by Browning. 

130. Pad. Tread down ; a provincialism. 

135. Mews. Enclosure. Mew or mews was originally the place in 
which tame hawks were kept (probably because they were confined there 
while mewing, or moulting) ; and hence, metaphorically, any close place. 

161. Dragon-pemied. Dragon-feathered; not in the dictionaries. 

177. Crouched. Macmillan's Selections has " Couched," which is prob- 
ably a misprint. 

203. Slug-horn. The word is not in Wore, or Wb. ; and the only 
meaning given in the Imp. Diet, is " Slogan." 

Alterations in "Pippa Passes." — We have followed the text of the 
London ed. of 1878, which has the following variations from the earlier 
readings as given in the Boston reprint : 

Prologue. — 83. Whoever it was quenched, etc. The early eds. omit 
it was. 

203. I will pass each. Early eds. have " by " for each. 
213, 214. Nor yet cicala, etc. The early reading was : 

"As yet, nor cicale dared carouse — 
Dared carouse !" 
Cicale is the plural of cicala. 

Scene I. — 32. With a sun. Originally, " With the sun." 
54. Here 'j the wine. " Here is the wine." 
82. Proof were needed. " Proof was needed." 
126. Return at eve. " Returned at eve." 

148. Pretence to strike. " Pretence to strike me." 

149. ""Tis not the crime'' s. '"Tis not for the crime's," 
158. Look it dozvn. "Look it down, then." 

168. Who stammered. " As he clung there — " 

179. When heaven''s. "When the heaven's." 

180. Suffered descend. " Seemed let descend." 



ADDENDA. I^y 

222. Call you out, " You call out." 

233. Speak to me, not of me ! " Speak to me — speak not of me !" 
245. Show herself. " And show herself." 

265. A hurry-dotvn. '* A hurrying down." 

Interlude I. — 37. Came alone. "Came singly." 

Scene IL— 15. The room. "The chamber." 

22. Their truth. "My truth." 

63. Our champion. " Our champions'." 

119. Beside. "Besides." 

124. Letting that. "Letting it." 

133. Siiffering borne. "Or suffering borne." 

138. Not me the shame. " Not so the shame." 

141. Hove y 021, love. " I love you, love you." 

155. Girls like me. "Girls like us." 

159. The world. "This world." 

162. Bjit still Natalia. " But no— Natalia." 

163. Though they smiled. "While they smiled." 
170. Until at innermost. " So that, at innermost." 
178. No— is not that. " Stop— is not that." 

187. My lore. '• My love " (a misprint ?). 
197. Deepest shadow. " Shadow threefold." 
202. Then do you. " So do you." 
205. Grew wise. "Grew wiser." 
207. Once when. " For once when." 

220. The nest, or the nook. " The spot, or the spot." 

221. May surely. " May the sureliest." 

223. The Love. "Or the Love." 

224. In the Valley. "In its Valley." 

227. When I love most. " I love most when." 

234. To reach thy heart, nor prick. " To wound thee, and not prick." 
242. The gold. " This gold." 

265. Earth . . . sea. " Earth's . . . sea's." 

274. ILer memory stays. "The peasants keep." 

275. And peasants sing ho^v once a certain page. " Her memory ; and 
songs tell how many a page." 

276. Of her so far. "Of one so far." 

277. Jiate the queen. " As a queen." 
279. Need him. " For him." 

289. Psyche. "Psyche's." 

305. Their laughter. "That laughter." 

318. Meet Luttvyche, I. " Shall I meet Lutwyche." 

319. Statue. "Statue's." 

Scene IIL— 10. That lean . . . look. " Who lean . . . looking." 

II. Listen. "Listening." 

14. Old Franz. " Now hark." 

30. Visit night by night. " Visit by night." 

43. Trouble. " Trouble me." 



1^8 NOTES. 

51. Cicala loughs. " Cicalas laugh." 

60. To this. "Of this." 
92. Most Jit. " Required." 

95. Otily here. " Here — here only." 

100. I find. " It happens." 

loi. Branch. "Branch's." 

134. Try me. " Ask me." 

141. Modern time. "Modern times." 

148. Saith God. " God saith." 

155. The god June. " Sovereign June." 

156. His revel thro' our leafy world. "His glorious revel thro' our 
world." 

i"]^. Age. "From age." 

202. These. " And these." 

219. Seeing. "Beholding." 

224. At the city. " In the city." 

227. This late time. " This late trial." 

Interlude III. — 10. Let sit and eat. " To be let eat." 
25. Rubbed the chalk-mark out, how tall. " Rubbed out the chalU- 
mark of how tall." 

43. Maize-tuft. "Maize-tuft's." 

58. Has cut. " Had cut." 

61. That she ? no, etc. "No," etc. 

Scene IV. — 78. I would better. "I had better." 

no. Foderi. " Poderes." 

138. The infantas. "That infant's." 

146. This heir's. "That heir's." 

191. Nought below. "And nought below." 

Epilogue, — 9. Life. "Life's." 

24. Raiv-silk-coloitred. "English-coloured." 

25. Keep. "Keeps." 

59. Call this. " See— call this." 

60. Something rare. "And something rare." 
66. Call this. " So call this." 

80. All achieved. " What's achieved." 
91. Over the woods. " Far over the woods." 
99. To really knotu. " Really to know." 

no. True in some sense, etc. After this line the early eds. have 
"Though I passed by them all, and felt no sign." 
113. Ranks the same. " Is the same." 



INDEX OF WORDS AND PHRASES EXPLAINED. 



Academy (at Venice), 185. 

Aerschot, 164. 

aery, 166. 

iEsculapius, an epic, etc., 

184. 
Agrippa, King, 190. 
Alciphron, 185. 
Almaign Kaiser, 186. 
all- express, 176. 
Ancona, 187. 
Andrea, 176, 191. 
Anselm, 166. 
antique-black, 167. 
Arcot, 163. 
Armenian, 18S. 
Ascoli, 194- 
A solo, 182. 
Assumption Day, 193- 

hah-f>ares, 174- 
basalt, 166. 
Beatrice, 176. 
bee's-wing, 163. 
beewise, 186. 
Bessarion, 185. 
bespate, 196. 
Beveridge, Bishop, 189, 
Bice, 176- 
bistre, 185. 
blab, 19 r. 
blessing back, 1 79. 
BUiphocks, 184, 187. 
Boom, 164. 
Breganze-wine, 192. 
butterfly ( emblem of the 
soul), 187. 

Campanula's chalice, 184. 

Canova, 183. 

Capuchin, 184. 

Carbonari, 190. 

Celarent, Darii, Ferio, 189. 

century of sonnets, 175. 

Cesena, 194. 

chafer, 183. 

Clialdee, 189. 

chalk (—crayon), 186. 

Charon's wherry, 189. 

chervil, 172 

Chiara, rgi. 



Chloe, 163. 
cicala, 183, 191. 
cipolin, 166. 
Cleon, 176. 
Clive, Robert, 161. 
Cock o' the Walk, 163. 
coil (=ado), 184. 
Coluthus, 185. 
compHnes, 195. 
coppice, 191. 
Cornaro, Caterina, 1S7. 
Correggio, 194. 
cowls, 195. ■ 
Croisic, 159- 
Croisickese, 160. 
crook (=crosier), 167. 
crystals (spelling), 177- 
cuirasses (verb), 163- 

Dalhem, 164. 

dartles, 175. 

deposed (=deposited), 190. 

deuzans, 192. 

dight, 171. 

disparting, 191. 

doit, 172. 

dome (=cathedral), 183. 

dole (=share), 168. 

dragon-penned, 196. 

draughts (game), 190- 

dray ( = nest), 195. 

drug-box, 163. 

Dryad, 186. 

Diiffeld, 164. 

duomo, 184. 

dusk green universe, 183. 

elucescebat, 167. 
entablature, 167. 
epistle-side, 166. 
et canibus nostris, 185. 

feel (noun), 182. 
Fenice, 185. 
Ferishtah, 171. 
Fermo, 194- 
Fiesole, 176. 
fig-peckers, 192. 
force a card, 163. 
Forli, 194. 



forthright, 162. 
Fossumbruno, 194. 
Franz, Old, 190. 
Frascati, 166. 
frieze, 167. 

Gandolf, 166. 
gibe, 183. 
Gibson, 174. 
Giovacchino, 184. 
got (rrbegotten), 191. 
grace (=favor), 187. 
Gr^ve, la, 160. 
grig, 1 88. 
Grisi, 174. 
gritstone, 167. 
Gualtier. 191. 
Guido Reni, 175. 

liad rather, 194. 

haled, 191. 

Hannibal Scratchy, 185. 

Hasselt, 164. 

head (=figure-head), 161 

heartened, 172. 

Hecate's supper, 189. 

hedge-shrew, 195- 

henceforth (=from that 

time), 187. 
Hertrippa, 190. 
Herve Riel, 159- 
Hipparclius, 186. 
Hippolyta, 186. 
Hiram's-Hammer, 169. 
hocus-pocussed, 189. 
Hogue, Cap la, 159. 
howlet, 195. 

in a tale. 185. 
indue, 168. 
irks, 168. 

jasper, 167. 
jesses, 187. 

Jethro's daughter, 176. 
June (masculine), igr. 
junetings, 193. 

Karshish, 176. 



200 INDEX OF WORDS AND PHRASES EXPLAINED. 



Karshook, 169, 176. 
Koenigsberg, 189. 

lamprey, 192. 
lapis-lazuli, 166. 
leather-coat (apple), 193. 
liberal hand, 176. 
lights (=lungs), 180. 
Lilith, 172. 
Lippo, 176. 
lire, 185. 
lob-worm, 195. 
Lokeren, 164. 
Looz, 164. 
Luca, 183. 
Lucius Junius, 190. 
lupine-seed, 189. 
lupines, 172. 
lush, 179. 

Madonnas (Raphael's), 175. 
Malamocco, 185. 
Malouins, 160. 
martagon, 182. 
mavis, 195. 
meander, 162. 
Mecheln, 164. 
merle, 195. 
Messina, 193. 
Mettemich, Prince, 190. 
mews, 196- 
millet-cake, 194. 
minion (=favorite), 185. 
Miserere mei, Domine, 195- 
niissal-marge, 176. 
Monsignor, 182. 
morning-star, gift of the, 191. 
mortal sin, 194. 
mortcloth, 167. 
mythos, 177. 

Nishapur, 172. 
Norbert, 176. 



olive-frail, 166. 
onion-stone, 166. 
ortolans, 193. 
over one green baize, 163. 

pad (= tread down), 196. 
Padua, 183. 
Panurge, 190. 
parsley crowns, 186. 
Pellico, Silvio, 191. 
Persian phrase, 172. 
Pier, 191. 
Pieta, 185. 

pique (of saddle), 164. 
pistachio-nut, 167. 
Plassy, 162. 
Plymouth, 160. 
podere, 194. 
polenta, 193. 
Possagno church, 183. 
posy, 189. 
proof-mark, 184. 
Prussia Improper, 189. 
PsicJie-fanciulla, 185. 
Psyche, 185. 
purslane, 172. 
Python, 192. 

R. A., 174- 
Rabbi Ben Ezra, 168. 
rampired, 161. 
right-arm's rod-sweep, 176. 
Roland, 176. 
rummer-glass, 162. 

saffron, 172. 
Saint Agnes, 182. 
Saint Malo, 160. 
Saint Mark's, 183. • 
Saint Praxed, 165. 
Samminiato, 177. 
Sebzevah, 172. 
seize the day, 168. 
seven and one (stars), 195. 



simooms, 172. 
Sinai-forehead, 176. 
slug-horn, 196. 
soldo ., 194. 
Solidor, 161. 
Spielberg, 190. 
steel (of engraver), 186. 
stigma, 176. 
swart-green, 186. 
Syriac, 189. 

term {^=^terfnhms), 167. 

throstle, 195. 

thunder-free, 186. 

Thyrsis, 163. 

thyrsus, 167. 

Titian at Treviso, the, 191. 

Tongres, 164. 

took sanctuary, 178. 

Tourville, 160. 

travertine,- 167. 

Trieste, 184. 

tripod, 167. 

truncheon, 186. 

Tully, 167. 

twats, 195. 

twelve and eighty, 160. 

Tydeus, 185. 

Ulpian, 167. 
up stood, 160. 

Vicenza, 183. 
visa^ 190. 
vizor, 167. 
vowels (Syriac), 189. 

weevil, 183. 
well-saffroned, 172. 
wittol. 184. 
would better, 194. 

Zoroaster, 177. 




SHAKESPEARE. 



WITH NOTES BY WM. J. ROLFE, A.M. 



The Merchant of Venice. 

The Tempest. 

Julius Caesar. 

Hamlet. 

As You Like it. 

Henry the Fifth. 

Macheth. 

Henry the Eighth. 

A 3Iidsummer-Night's Dream 

Richard the Second. 

Richard the Third. 

Much Ado About Nothing. 

Antony and Cleopatra. 

Romeo and Juliet. 

Othello. 

Twelfth Night. 

The Winter's Tale. 

King John. 

Henry IT. Part I. 

Henry IV. Part II. 

Illustrated. i6mo, Cloth, 56 cents 

FRIENDLY EDITION, complete in 20 vols., i6mo, Cloth, $30 00 : 
Half Calf, $60 00. {Sold only in Sefs.) 



King Lear. 

The Taming of the Shrew. 
All 's Well That Ends Well. 
Coriolanus. 
Comedy of Errors. 
Cymbeline. 

Merry Wives of Windsor. 
Measure for Measure. 
Two (xentlemen of Verona. 
Love's Labour 's Lost. 
Timon of Athens. 
Henry VI. Part I. 
Henry VI. Part II. 
Henry VI. Part III. 
Troilus and Cressida. 
Pericles, Prince of Tyre, 
The Two Noble Kinsmen. 
Poems. 
Sonnets. 

Titus Andronicus. 
per vol. ; Paper, 40 cents per vol. 



In the preparation of this edition of the English Classics it has been 
the aim to adapt them for school and home reading, in essentially the 
same way as Greek and Latin Classics are edited for educational pur- 
poses. The chief requisites are a pure text {expurgated, if necessary), 
and the notes needed for its thorough explanation and illustration. 

Each of Shakespeare's plays is complete in one volume, and is pre- 
ceded by an Introduction containing the " History of the Play," the 
" Sources of the Plot," and " Critical Comments on the Play." 



From Horace Howard Furness, Ph.D., LL.D., Editor of the ^^ Neiv 
Vnrioi-um Shakespeaj-e.'''' 
No one can examine these volumes and fail to be impressed with the 
conscientious accuracy and scholarly completeness with which they are 
edited. The educational purposes for which the notes are written Mr. 
Rolfe never loses sight of, but like "a well-experienced archer hits the 
mark his eye doth level at." 



Rolfe^s Shakespeare. 



From F. J. Furnivall, Director of the N'exv Shakspere Society, London. 
The merit I see in Mr. Rolfe's school editions of Shakspere's Plays 
over those most widely used in England is that Mr. Rolfe edits the plays 
as works of a poet, and not only as productions in Tudor English. Some 
editors think that all they have to do with a play is to state its source 
and explain its hard words and allusions ; they treat it as they would a 
charter or a catalogue of household furniture, and then rest satisfied. 
But Mr. Rolfe, while clearing up all verbal difficulties as carefully as any 
Dryasdust, always adds the choicest extracts he can find, on the spirit 
and special "note" of each play, and on the leading characteristics of its 
chief personages. He does not leave the student without help in getting 
at Shakspere's chief attributes, his characterization and poetic power. 
And every practical teacher knows that while every boy can look out 
hard words in a lexicon for himself, not one in a score can, unhelped, 
catch points of and realize character, and feel and express the distinctive 
individuality of each play as a poetic creation. 

From Prof. Edward Dowden, LL.D., of the University of Dublin, Au- 
thor of " Shakspere : His Mind and Art:' 
I incline to think that no edition is likely to be so useful for school and 
home reading as yours. Your notes contain so much accurate instruc- 
tion, with so little that is superfluous; you do not neglect the aesthetic 
study of the play ; and in externals, paper, type, binding, etc., you make 
a book "pleasant to the eye" (as well as "to be desired to make one 
wise") — no small matter, I think, with young readers and with old. 

Fro7n Edwin A. Abbott, M.A., Author of "■ Shakespearian Grammary 
I have not seen any edition that compresses so much necessary infor- 
mation into so small a space, nor any that so completely avoids the com- 
mon faults of commentaries on Shakespeare— needless repetition, super- 
fluous explanation, and unscholar-like ignoring of difficulties. 

From Hiram Corson, M.A., Professor of Anglo-Saxon and English 
Literature, Cornell University, Ithaca, N. V. 

In the way of annotated editions of separate plays of Shakespeare, fjr 
educational purposes, I know of none quite up to Rolfe's. 



Rolfe^s Shakespeare. 



From Prof. F. J. Child, of Harvard Uriiversity, 

I read your " Merchant of Venice " with my class, and found it in every 
respect an excellent edition. I do not agree with my friend White in the 
opinion that Shakespeare requires but few notes — that is, if he is to be 
thoroughly understood. Doubtless he may be enjoyed, and many a hard 
place slid over. Your notes give all the help a young student requires, 
and yet the reader for pleasure will easily get at just what he wants. 
You have indeed been conscientiously concise. 

Under date of July 25, 1879, Prof. Child adds: Mr. Rolfe's editions 
of plays of Shakespeare are very valuable and convenient books, whether 
for a college class or for private study. I have used them with my 
students, and I welcome every adcJtion that is made to the series. They 
show care, research, and good judgment, and are fully up to the time in 
scholarship. I fully agree with the opinion that experienced teachers 
have expressed of the excellence of these books. 

From Rev. A. P. Peabody, D.D., Professor in Harvard University. 

I regard your own work as of the highest merit, while you have turned 
the labors of others to the best possible account. I want to have the 
higher classes of our schools introduced to Shakespeare chief of all, and 
then to other standard English authors ; but this cannot be done to ad- 
vantage unless under a teacher of equally rare gifts and abundant leisure, 
or through editions specially prepared for such use. I trust that you 
will have the requisite encouragement to proceed with a work so hap- 
pily begun. 

From the Exavmter and Chronicle, N. V. 

We repeat what we have often said, that there is no edition of Shake- 
speare which seems to us preferable to Mr. Rolfe's. As mere specimens 
of the printer's and binder's art they are unexcelled, and their other 
merits are equally high. Mr. Rolfe, having learned by the practical ex- 
perience of the class-room what aid the average student really needs in 
order to read Shakespeare intelligently, has put just that amount pf aid 
into his notes, and no more. Having said what needs to be. said, he Stops 
there. It is a rare virtue in the editor of a classic, and we are propor- 
tionately grateful for it. 



Rolfe''s Shakespeare. 



From the N. Y. Times. 

This work has been done so well that it could hardly have been done 
better. It shows throughout knowledge, taste, discriminating judgment, 
and, what is rarer and of yet higher value, a sympathetic appreciation of 
the poet's moods and purposes. 

From the Pacific School Journal, San Francisco. 

This edition of Shakespeare's plays bids fair to be the most valuable 
aid to the study of English literature yet published. For educational 
purposes it is beyond praise. Each of the plays is printed in large clear 
type and on excellent paper. Every difficulty of the text is clearly ex- 
plained by copious notes It is remarkable how many new beauties one 
may discern in Shakespeare with the aid of the glossaries attached to 
these books. . . . Teachers can do no higher, better work than to incul- 
cate a love for the best literature, and such books as these will best aid 
them in cultivating a pure and refined taste. 

Fro7n the Christian Union, N. Y. 

Mr.W. J. Rolfe's capital edition of Shakespeare ... by far the best edi- 
tion for school and parlor use. We speak after some practical use of it 
in a village Shakespeare Club. The notes are brief but useful ; and the 
necessary expurgations are managed with discriminating skill. 

From the Academy, London. 

Mr. Rolfe's excellent series of school editions of the Plays of Shake- 
speare . . . they diflfer from some of the English ones in looking on the 
plays as something more than word - puzzles. They give the student 
helps and hints on the characters and meanings of the plays, while the 
word-notes are also full and posted up to the latest date. . . . Mr. Rolfe 
also adds to each of his books a most useful " Index of Words and 
Phrases Explained." 



Published by HARPER & BROTHERS, New York. 

1^^ A ny of the above works will be sent by mail, postage prepaid, to any part of the 
United States or Canada, on receipt of the price. 



OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 

SELECT POEMS- OF OLIVER GOLDSMITH. Edited, 
with Notes, by William J. Rolfe, A.M., formerly Head 
Master of the High School, Cambridge, Mass. Illus- 
trated. i6mo, Paper, 40 cents ; Cloth, 56 cents. {^Uni- 
form with Rolfe' s Shakespeare?) 



The carefully arranged editions of " The Merchant of Venice " and 
other of Shakespeare's plays prepared by Mr. William J. Rolfe for the 
use of students will be rememlDered with pleasure by many readers, and 
they will welcome another volume of a similar character from the same 
source, in the form of the " Select Poems of Oliver Goldsmith," edited 
with notes fuller than those of any other known edition, many of them 
original with the editor. — Boston Transcript. 

Mr. Rolfe is doing very useful work in the preparation of compact 
hand-books for study in English literature. His own personal culture 
and his long experience as a teacher give him good knowledge of what 
is wanted in this way. — The Congregationalist, Boston. 

Mr. Rolfe has prefixed to the Poems selections illustrative of Gold- 
smith's character as a man, and grade as a poet, from sketches by Ma- 
caulay, Thackeray, George Colman, Thomas Campbell, John Forster, 
and Washington Irving. He has also appended at the end of the 
volume a body of scholarly notes explaining and illustrating the poems, 
and dealing with the times in which they were written, as well as the 
incidents and circumstances attending their composition. — Christian 
Intelligencer, N. Y. 

The notes are just and discriminating in tone, and supply all that is 
necessary either for understanding the thought of the several poems, or 
for a critical study of the language. The use of such books in the school- 
room cannot but contribute largely towards putting the study of English 
literature upon a sound basis ; and many an adult reader would find in 
the present volume an excellent opportunity for becoming critically ac- 
quainted with one of the greatest of last century's poets. — Appletoii's 
Journal, N. Y. 



Published by HARPER & BROTHERS, New York. 

IW Sent by 7nail, postage prepaid, to any part of the United States or Canada, on 
receipt of the price. 



THOMAS GRAY. 

SELECT POEMS OF THOMAS GRAY. Edited, with 
Notes, by William J. Rolfe, A.M., formerly Head 
Master of the High School, Cambridge, Mass. Illus- 
trated. Square i6mo, Paper, 40 cents ; Cloth, 56 cents. 
( Uniform with Rolfe' s Shakespeare^ 



Mr. Rolfe has done his work in a manner that comes as near to per- 
fection as man can approach. He knows his subject so well that he is 
competent to instruct all in it ; and readers will find an immense amount 
of knowledge in his elegant volume, all set forth in the most admirable 
order, and breathing the most liberal and enlightened spirit, he being a 
warm appreciator of the divinity of genius. — Boston Traveller. 

The great merit of these books lies in their carefully edited text, and in 
the fulness of their explanatory notes. Mr. Rolfe is not satisfied with 
simply expounding, but he explores the entire field of English literature, 
and therefrom gathers a multitude of illustrations that are interesting in 
themselves and valuable as a commentary on the text. He not only in- 
structs, but stimulates his readers to fresh exertion ; and it is this stimu- 
lation that makes his labor so productive in the school-room. — Saturday 
livening Gazette, Boston, 

Mr. William J. Rolfe, to whom English literature is largely indebted 
for annotated and richly illustrated editions of several of Shakespeare's 
Plays, has treated the " Select Poems of Thomas Gray" in the same way 
— ^just as he had previously dealt with the best of Goldsmith's poems. — 
Philadelphia Press. 

Mr. Rolfe's edition of Thomas Gray's select poems is mai\ed by the 
same discriminating taste as his other classics. — Springfield Republican. 

Mr. Rolfe's rare abilities as a teacher and his fine scholarly tastes ena- 
ble him to prepare a classic like this in the best manner for school use. 
There could be no better exercise for the advanced classes in our schools 
than the critical study of our best authors, and the volumes that Mr. Rolfe 
has prepared will hasten the time when the study of mere form will give 
place to the study of the spirit of our literature. — Louisville Courier- 
Journal. 

An elegant and scholarly little volume. — Christian Intelligencer, N. Y. 



Published by HARPER & BROTHERS, New Youk. 

Sent hy viail, fosiage preP'iid, to any part of the United States or Canada, on 
receipt of the price. 



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